How to make salt dough
In testoplasty, salt dough familiar to all young mothers is used. The composition of the modeling dough is very simple:
- 300 g flour
- 300 g salt
- 200 ml water
- 1 tbsp vegetable oil (optional)
Mix salt with flour and, stirring the mixture thoroughly, gradually add water. Experienced art therapists recommend using finely ground salt and adding a tablespoon of refined oil to the mixture to make the consistency more elastic. The unused portion of the dough can be stored in the refrigerator until the next session.
You can see how to prepare salt dough and what materials you will need for creativity in this detailed video tutorial:
How to sculpt from salt dough
Dough is an incredibly pliable material from which you can mold anything: from pots and animal figures to panels of various sizes. Therefore, crafts made from salt dough provide a huge scope for imagination, developing skills and creating wonderful things for decoration, games and gifts for each other.
To create the simplest dough products, it is enough to have a rolling pin and a board; for children over three years old and adults, you can stock up on culinary decor and use toothpicks to draw details.
For almost all dough crafts, the workpiece is usually a “sausage” or a “ball”. To create, for example, a little man, a ball is used for the head, and sausages are used to sculpt the body, arms and legs.
Complex shapes can be created from rolled out dough using templates and molds. You can decorate the product with ribbons, beads, leaves or braids made of dough or anything else of the child’s choice. And of course, a special stage is painting the resulting figure.
You can paint crafts made from salt dough with your own hands, both at the modeling stage, and while kneading the dough and after the product has completely dried.
And you can dry crafts made from salt dough at room temperature, in the oven at 50 degrees and in the microwave on the lowest defrost setting. Drying dough products, of course, will take time, but then such a gift will delight its creator and owner for a long time!
How to make casts from salt dough
An example of an art therapy lesson with children
Crafts made from dough can become an independent activity for children of preschool and primary school age. An activity can provide additional educational information, for example, by making an owl from salt dough, telling the child all the interesting facts about this bird. But the big advantage of testoplasty is that modeling itself brings tangible benefits, both to mental processes and psychologically harmonizing consciousness.
On the eve of March 8, I conducted such a lesson with my son. The topic was banal - preparing gifts for teachers with your own hands. Despite the fact that at first I had to persuade him to go sculpt, then I couldn’t stop him! So he went wild, creating crafts one better than the other)))
So we got these 8s with flowers and baskets with fruits and flowers.
As soon as our dough crafts are dry (and they dry in the oven at a low temperature and just in the room), we plan to glue magnetic tape to them so that they become a warm decoration for the refrigerator of our favorite teacher)))
In this video I showed our vision of modeling salt dough for the holiday of March 8:
The video below presents several more master classes on making crafts from salt dough:
