Stamped Salt Dough Ornaments

Here is a variation on the salt-dough ornament tutorial I did for Katy Elliott last year (for full instructions on making and cooking the dough, refer to that). I stamped these with ink after I rolled them out and before I baked them, using stamps and regular old stamp ink.

A few tips:

• The recipe is simple - one part salt + one part water + two parts flour - but I find keeping the parts between 1/4 and 1/2 cup makes the most workable amount of dough. I make extra batches as I need them.
• Nothing beats using a Kitchen-Aid for a getting perfectly smooth, chalk-white dough. It also eliminates the need to knead the dough at all.
• A stamp pad with dry ink won't bleed. Using a light hand when inking also helps.
• Stamp the designs before you use a biscuit cutter/glass/shape cutter to cut out the ornaments. 
• If you roll the dough out directly on a Silpat, do your stamping and cutting and remove the excess, you will get perfect edges every time. It's trickier if you make them then try to move them toa  cookie sheet.
• A smaller scaled ornament works best. The biggest of these is about 2.5". Any bigger, and it gets harder to dry them out.

Here are some made with Little Yellow Owl Workshop stamps (the snowflake is from another company):

I also made some using my favorite tree stamps. The stamps are wide and rectangular, but I cut circles out of the stamped dough. I love how these turned out:

They are slightly embossed:

Finish with a bit of embroidery floss and voila: ornaments. They would also make excellent gift tags - just use a fine-tipped permanent ink pen. They are so easy to make that you could whip up a batch or two over the weekend for last minute gifts.

 

Source: EvenCleveland  via Sandra Alexander on Pinterest