What better way to keep memories of the kids handprints than doing them yourself at home. During lockdown we wanted to make clay and had seen lots of nice ideas online. I wasn’t sure these were going to work but we gave it a bash anyway. DIY clay can get pretty sticky and doesn’t often form. Many clay recipes that I’ve researched online advise you to bake the clay at a low temperature for several hours. We had plenty of time to kill during lockdown lol!
Add all the ingredients to the bowl.
Then roll out on a flat surface when a dough is formed.
The recipe we used was pretty straightforward and didn’t take many ingredients. The kids loved the messy part rolling it out. This is the recipe we used;
- 1 Cup of Salt
- 1 Cup of Flour
- 1/2 Cup of Water
Mix all ingredients together in a bowl until it forms a dough. Then roll onto a flat surface and mold into the shape(s) that you want. In our case we wanted handprints so we rolled into a small circle and placed our handprint into the circle. We had extra leftover so the kids also made some little shapes like hearts and stars.
Bake in a preheated oven at 200F for 3 hours. It does seem like a long time but they do turn out better if left longer. Then set them aside to cool down for at least an hour.
For painting our handprints we used acrylic paints. These were the best kind of paints to use as they didn’t need a second coat and gave the best coverage.
The metallic paint turned out awesome for the handprints and really stood out. We still have to give them a coat of gloss or mod podge just to keep them nice and stop the paint chipping.
The kids have been really helpful at clean up time too. Its handy having two extra pot washers around lol!
I don’t know why I always had this fear of making clay. I guess there’s always a chance it won’t come out right and then you’ve wasted 3 hours, but this was a pretty easy recipe to follow and we didn’t have much going on during lockdown as you’ll all know 😆 Now we’ve done it, we’ll do more! Great idea for xmas gifts!
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