Salt Dough Craft Instructions - Papaya Fruit School Project

Salt Dough Craft

My daughter goes to a wonderful school but sometimes I go crazy trying to manage her school projects and everything! 

For her 2nd language they have the theme fruits-- well sounds reasonable doesnt it? Well, her particular project was the fruit "Papaya" .

She had to take a chart ,scrapbook or model on the Papaya and speak about it in Hindi. 

For my international friends India is a very diverse country and has more languages than any other country in the world with an amazing 800 languages !![Yeah I think even my Indian friends wont know that fact!!] Hindi is the one language many know how to speak in India but its not my native tongue and I  had a tough time  teaching a 5 year old the wondrous properties of the Papaya fruit in Hindi!

To compensate for possible inadequacies in her "talk" I thought I would put my heart into the creative aspect of it and we made a life size Papaya fruit model using salt dough.

       Salt Dough Craft Instructions
       Make your salt dough
       Recipe for Salt Dough 

       1 cup Plain Flour[ Maida]  +1/2 cup Salt + 1/2 cup water[approx] 

       Knead well only adding as much water as you need.The right consistency is when the dough does not have cracks and does not stick to your fingers.
        Small salt dough projects can be made with the dough only.

      To make large projects make the inner core from Aluminium foil [ you can recycle a bit of used Aluminium foil packaging here]. I made a hollow ovoid shape for our cut Papaya fruit and 2 hollow ovoids over which I again wrapped Aluminium foil for our whole Papaya fruit.

Salt Dough Craft

       Roll out and mold a sheet of salt dough [ours is around 4 mm thick] over your Aluminium foil core.

       Bake it at the lowest setting[ 150 C if your oven has it] of your oven for a period ranging from 45 mins to 2 hours. In my oven our salt dough gets done in 30-40 mins most of the time.When its done your salt dough craft should sound hard on tapping [ like you are tapping on wood!]. 

Salt Dough Craft

      Cool your salt dough project in the oven itself as sudden change of temperature can let cracks appear in your salt dough craft.
       Paint your slat dough craft with acrylic paint once it has cooled down. Do not use water colors as you risk getting your salt dough craft go all lumpy and gooey!

Salt Dough Craft

       Couple of coats of varnish can help your salt dough craft last long. I didnt apply varnish on this project as I didnt have varnish at home and didnt have time to go buy it!

Salt Dough Craft

       With the leftover salt dough we made lots of decorations for our Christmas tree using playdough cutters. The angel in the right hand bottom corner was made free hand by my 5 year old! Small objects such as shown below do not need an aluminium foil core.

Salt Dough Craft

       A fruit needs a basket doesnt it!So we made a fruit basket by decorating a steel tray with paper flowers and leaves.Here you can see my little one gluing punched paper leaves to her fruit basket! She is full of concentration to get the position just right!!

Salt Dough Craft

       The flowers are punchcraft flowers with the orange centers recycled from medication pamphlets! 

Punchcraft Flowers

      Here is the close up of our Punchcraft flowers.

Punched flowers

       Our Cut papaya looked a bit odd so we added  seeds to it using black rhinestones.Here is my little one gluing the "seeds".

Salt Dough Craft

       I Printed out 2 real Papaya leaves from the net and drew free hand some more leaves based on the shape.My daughter had fun coloring the leaves in a 2 tone fashion!

Salt Dough Craft

        Our Papaya project was a big hit in her Hindi class and I felt all the effort and trouble was worth it when I saw the  pride and happiness in my daughters face when she came home from school beaming and proudly showed me the "5 stars" and "sticker" she had got for her talk!! I also got lots of queries from her teachers on how to make it! 

              I hope our story and instructions will help you in some way for maybe a school project, home decor,toy making or simply to have fun crafting.Do leave me your comments
     Here are links to more school projects we have done : School Projects