Salt dough recipe and tips : modelling and painting

Salt dough in Provence...

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Recette pâte à sel

Salt dough : my little tips concerning all the stages

salt dough recipe modelling hanging conserving
baking sanding painting varnishing
It is a question simply here of making you benefit from my experiment. It is while modelling and while painting your own patterns that you will discover how it's funny.

The salt dough recipe

1 cup of table salt
2 cup of flour including 2 spoons of buckwheat flour: (pastry is easier to work with... as Breton pancake pastry however !)
3/4 cup of tepid water: (the quantity of water depends on ambient moisture)

In a salad bowl, mix first with a wood spoon salt and flour.
Then, incorporate water until forming a large ball..
Knead dough for a long time on a worktop a little bit floured .

If the paste is sticking, it is necessary to add a proportioned mixture of flour and salt.

One can also use deicing salt. First, mix the salt with water : a part will be thus dissolved. The effect obtained is rustic! I use it for the onion braids or the rough coats of the country houses.

Salt dough Modelling
To know: for worked objects, it is necessary to count from 1 to 2 hours of modelling. It is thus necessary to have a little time in front of oneself!

Think of regularly humidifying with the brush a modelling in the course of work so that surface does not deteriorate.

Essential tools: :

	A knife	Out of plastic, it is ideal for the children.
	Spades out of wooden	Are used to assemble between them the elements of a modelling.
	A roller	Necessary to level.
	A garlicpress	To model hairs of figures or animals.
	Aluminum foil	Crushed in balls or cubes, allow to maintain the paste the time of cooking.
	A brush	To humidify and also stick between them the elements of a modelling.

The children like to use small aperitif pikes or spades with skewers out of wooden. It is also the occasion to bring out the accessories of their modelling clay (to even borrow them!).

I cover my plate with the furnace of a greaseproof paper sheet and I deposit modellings progressively there. For the most fragile modellings, not to be likely to damage them by moving them of the scheme of work to the plate, I place a piece of greaseproof paper sheet on my scheme of work which I make then slip on the plate.
A thick modelling cooks with difficulty. From where easy way:

Form a ball of aluminum foil which one covers with paste for the thickest elements or fatties!

Hanging
I use

- sometimes, wire curved in the shape of long hairpin

- sometimes, hang in brass tables small sizes.

I place them before the cooking on each side of modelling or, if it acts characters, in the shoulders to the body. Ribbons or rafia (natural or of color) last in these fasteners allow a quite decorative suspension.

Conserving
A surplus of paste can be can be preserved in a well closed bag of congelation. Several days after, a kneading is enough to return to the paste a flexible texture. With the remainders of pastes, I make small accessories (baskets, umbrellas), musical instruments (violins, quadrants) and small quite round heads in which I insert a spade out of wooden. I make them cook with my other modellings. Ideally, I will benefit from it another day in new modellings: in practice, it is my son who generally benefits from it! The interest is to have accessories and heads of hard characters thus easier to integrate in modellings.

Salt dough Baking
Duration: from 3 to 4 hours with 100° in my furnace with revolving heat by filling two or three grids of the furnace.

At the end of one hour, I withdraw modellings of the plate and the greaseproof paper to pose them with same the grid: thus the back also cooks.

A modelling is dry when the blade of the knife by tapping it emits a clear sound (and this on the two faces of course).

Sandpapering
This stage is useful for a perfect completion. Sandpapering is carried out with the very fine sandpaper and makes it possible to remove the tiny asperities (painting will be only more beautiful) and to smooth the edge of modelling (especially if this one were made with the greaseproof paper).

Painting
Acrylic painting for wood or fabrics is appropriate very well.

What a pleasure of choosing a whole of colours which will be harmonized between them!
In "stretching" the colors (by wetting the brush abundantly), one obtains a more natural painting and which is based in the reliefs.

I often use two complementary colors: the second layer (that I apply when first is dry) is "stretched even more".
That can give for example an effect of painting lasurée for a piece of furniture (with a second layer light but darker) or of silk trade (with a second gilded layer).

Varnishing
There, the pleasure is only in the fact that modelling is soon ready to decorate my walls... the task is ungrateful but essential to protect at the same time from dust and moisture. Two to three layers are even necessary and this of the two faces. I use a varnish for wood "which does not yellow". Chechmate or brilliance : it is according to the required effect.

24 hours after... the result is there!

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