Olympic Party Time: Behind The Crafts Part 3 — The Medals

Of course, our Olympic Day needed medals to make the day really special! When planning out the day, I intentionally picked only 3 countries for the kids to represent – so that everyone would get a medal!

I was inspired to make the medals after seeing some made on AlphaMom. She used some store bought puffy stuff to make them, but I didn’t want to go buy anything  - so I thought salt dough might work. I’ve never made salt dough before, but it was really easy – and fun!

When you’re making it, the dough has a similar feel to Play Dough – but after a quick bake in the oven they harden right up. After looking online for a good recipe for salt dough I came up with a combination that worked well for us.

 

Salt Dough:

1 cup of table salt

3 cups of flour

3/4 -1 cup of water

Mix the salt and flour and then add water until it’s a good texture, like play dough. If it gets too sticky add more flour.

Roll out flat, and use cookie cutters to cut out shapes, or create other designs while the dough is soft.

Bake for 1 hour at 250.

Once cool, paint with acrylic paint.

Once the dough was made, and rolled flat with a rolling pin, we used a circle cookie cutter cut out a medal shape. Then , we used a small tube to press lightly into the dough, to made the Olympic Rings pattern, and a bamboo skewer to etch the pattern on the bottom of each medal. Finally, I cut a hole at the top of each medal, for the ribbon to go through.

After we baked them for an hour and let them cool, we painted them with metallic acrylic paint. When they were dry, I added a ribbon which I sewed closed at the back. While I was initially hoping to find enough of the same colour ribbon at the dollar store to use for all the medals, I ended up having to use a different colour for each medal.

I think the kids really felt special with the medal around their neck. We had a lot of fun making these, and I’m sure we’ll be making salt dough again for a project soon!