Painting Salt Dough Ornaments with nail polish

What do you do with those colors that you get that turn out to be a bad color for your skin tone, crappy formula, etc?

Here is one simple solution. Salt dough ornaments! Its Christmas Break here. That means no preschool and no autism resources for our area.

First make up a batch of salt dough. There are cooking recipes and non cooking recipes. I went with the easiest recipe I could find (i.e. no cooking)

Salt dough recipe:
1 cup salt
2 cups all purpose flour
1 cup warm water

Mix flour and salt with a fork. Slowly add in water and mix into a dough. I used my hands at this point for mixing. Knead the dough for 5 minutes or until its a good consistency. You can roll this out and cut with cookie cutters. (We did ours free hand because I am awesome like that)

Bake at 200 for 2-3 hours. (I upped the oven to 325, the bottoms were slightly brown.)

Now once they are dry you can paint them.

You will want something over the table. I brought out part of the recycle bin (cereal box) and opened it up to cover most of the table. A paper plate will also work.

I was accompanied by a 2 year old and a 4 year old.

I regretted the nail polish as medium choice once we all started going. Especially since a few of the polishes I had pulled out to use up were from before 2006 and not 3 Free. If you haven't whiffed one of those lately, whew its STRONG!

But I used up one polish completely that was over 10 years old and with thinner it was still clumpy and streaky, and most of a green that looked terrible on me. And even a bit of the yellow that stained my nails. Overall I am quite happy.

So were my helpers. Even though the 2 year old won't pose, at least he helped paint!

The 2 year old kept painting everything red so we added a heart to the angel.

This was meant to be a giant heart, the back side she pained all green and said was a leaf. This side was decorated with Christmas Lights.

Top row (L to R) was a sun, then the baby Jesus, then candy cane. The baby Jesus we had to mix colors to get a brownish tan. Then his face was painted red several times by the resident red painter i.e. 2 year old. Eventually I said ok.
Middle row was a holiday tree, wreath, candy canes.
Bottom row was heart/Love, a doughnut with sprinkles. Glitter wreath with holly and one last candy cane.

In case yo are curious what sort of 'browning' a higher oven temp with do, the bottom right candy cane is flipped over to show the 'browned' side. Its very light.

I added some spare yarn and hung these on the tree. Happy Holidays!