Pinterest Ornaments

On Saturday evening, Brad and I decorated the house for Christmas.  We put up our tree, and stockings, and I threw garland all over the place.

On Sunday, some friends came down from Seattle to be crafty with me.  My roommate from college is always into doing something artsy, and her husband was my BFF all throughout college, so they came down to hang out and make things.

 And I tried my very first DIY from Pinterest.

{Via}

I'd seen this pin floating around for a while now.  I had originally wanted to make salt dough ornaments this year because I remember having them when I was growing up. But this project for Clay Ornaments claims to make smoother dough and be easier to decorate than your traditional salt dough recipes.

My first mistake,  I didn't read the directions completely before starting.  I poured the ingredients into a bowl and couldn't figure out why it was so soupy.  ...Oh, right.  You have to heat it in a pot to get it to solidify.  Fail #1, for me.

Fail #2.  Since we didn't read the directions, we didn't realize these cute little guys would take HOURS from beginning to end. You heat up the ingredients to create the dough.  And then you wait a couple hours for the dough to cool in a bowl under a damp cloth. Argh.

Since it was nearly 3pm on Sunday when we started, we were impatient, and didn't wait for the dough to completely cool before we rolled it out and set to cutting and decorating.  This part seemed to go OK.  The dough was a little bit hard to carve. Impossible to carve, actually. Another place we didn't read. The directions recommended using stamps to make your patterns... dangit. I'd only bought clay moulding tools. Fail #3.

And then we went to put the raw ornaments on the cookie sheets to bake for an hour. Here's where we failed twice.  The directions say to bake at 175'F... my oven starts at 200. The directions also say to use parchment paper, and guess what I was out of.  That's right. Parchment paper.  You know what doesn't work very well when making WHITE dough ornaments?  Olive oil spray.  Turns everything yellow. Also, I'm pretty sure it added too much moisture, and screwed up the finished product.

Which after baking for over an hour turned out like this....

Ornament Fail.  There was no hanging these bad boys from the tree, because as soon as you picked them up they fell apart.

And they looked so pretty on Pinterest, too...