Salt dough is a good alternative to store-bought craft and modelling materials, as you usually have the ingredients in the house and they are not expensive. All you need is 2 cups of flour, 1 cup of salt and a little water.
Mix the flour and salt in a bowl with lukewarm water and knead together. This is best done with your hands, as the dough quickly becomes very thick. You must not add too much water, otherwise the kneaded figures will not hold together and will have to dry for too long, or will form cracks as they dry.

As the base colour is white due to the flour, you can vary it slightly by adding food colouring, or paint the figures with colours after they have dried.

Of course, you can also decorate the dough moulds and figures, but if you do this before drying, you should note that the material must be able to withstand a temperature of approx. 150ªC to which it is exposed in the oven. The salt dough figures must bake there for approx. 45 minutes until dry.

Instead, you can already plan where you want to attach various decorative materials after the oven has dried and prepare them: for example, to attach colourful feathers to a parrot, pierce holes where they are to be placed later. The holes should only be slightly larger than the diameter of the feathers, as the dough will shrink slightly as it dries.

If it seems too difficult to knead all the parts of a figure from just one piece, you can easily knead different parts separately and then join them together. To do this, brush the seams of the dough pieces with a little water, which reinforces the sticking effect.

In addition to figures, you can also create murals, mould beads that you can paint later or conjure up things for dolls. There are no limits to your imagination and you can be sure that the material is non-toxic. Of course, you shouldn't eat the dough because, as its name suggests, it only tastes of salt!

Even the very youngest children can get involved in this fun activity; you can easily roll out a ball of dough for them and make a hand or footprint of them.