Discard Sourdough Salt Dough!!

By : | 4 Comments | On : January 18, 2015 | Category : Crafts, Crafts & DIY, Food, Sourdough, Sourdough

discard sourdough salt dough crafts

I have quietly been working on this for a couple of days now, not-so-patiently waiting to share this idea! In all my searching for what to do with discard SD starter, I have never come across this before…

Why not use up unfed or ‘discard’ sourdough starter to make salt dough? Incorporating my love of baking with my love of crafting (and a very strong discomfort with wasting perfectly good flour…).

The usual (non sourdough) salt dough recipe is:

1 cup flour
1/2 cup salt
1/2 – 1 cup water (enough to make a workable dough)

Roll out, etc. then bake at 200F for 2 hours or until dry. This can also be air dried, but it will take a few days.

My sourdough starter is currently 1:1 flour and water, so it was just a matter of adjusting quantities. I am getting low on all purpose, so I used whole wheat LOL. Um, it’s decoration – yeah, that’s it.
I’m going to guess that this salt dough, if left to ‘rise’ might be capable of making interesting puffy shapes. But I didn’t wait to find out.

It’s a pretty simple recipe, so I just eyeballed it. I rolled a ball and started rolling it out to about 1/4″ thickness. You can roll this stuff thinner or thicker if you like.
It is pretty easy to work with and stays workable a very long time.

I used stamps to make a few designs, I didn’t use ink, but it would work if you wanted to ink your stamp first. Then I cut them into shapes with a knife and arranged them on a baking sheet.
I then used a chopstick to make holes through them so I could hang them later.
I also inserted wire in the edge of one.

After baking at 200F for 2.5 hours, they were dried through.
I sanded the edges and then used my lace kemper tool to clean up the edges of the hole on the backs of all of them.

I painted them using nail polish. I experimented with a few things and watercolor worked pretty nicely as well, but I really like the coverage and bold color I got with the polish. It also adds a nice lacquered look.

They could be coated with polyurethane at this point to waterproof them, but I wasn’t interested in that for this project.

I used hot glue to attach felt on the back side of a few pieces and used jump rings in others.

I wired a bunch together as a wall hanger, and added a keyring with a latch on a felted heart. (The heart is going to be clipped on my purse.)
I still have quite a few to paint and use somewhere!

curled up wires

I decided to curl the wires by wrapping them around a chop stick.
What do you think?

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Comments (4)

  1. posted by Petra on June 24, 2015

    I really like the wall decor and the key ring! Great ideas!

      Reply
  2. posted by Linda Manns Linneman on July 13, 2015

    This is so neat. What a fun project. Your work turned out great. Thank you so much for sharing

      Reply
    • posted by YogurtHydro on July 24, 2015

      I loved this stuff when I was a kid, I hadn’t used salt dough in years – it is still fun.:)

        Reply

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