Day 6 of Newlywed Christmas Activities - Make Paw Print Ornaments

If you have read my blog, you know that I LOVE my pets. Hubby and I have a total of eleven cats and dogs. We would definitely adopt more if we had more room. They are our worlds, so we knew that we had to incorporate them in our activities wherever possible. For the sixth day of Christmas, I set-up for us to create salt dough ornaments of their paw prints. 

To start out with our newest newlywed craft project, I searched Pinterest for the perfect recipe for our salt dough. We found this one that was pretty simple and required very little work. 

Hubby got to work measuring out the salt, flour, and water. 

Kneading the dough. Can you believe
that Hubby has never done this before?

I took over with rolling the dough. Since we did not have a rolling pin,
I used my favorite NKUT aluminum water bottle. 

So after we had the dough rolled out, cut into circles, and laid on baking sheets, the hard part came...getting the zoo to participate. Some of the zoo were great at letting us hold them and pressing their paws into the dough, others gave us so much trouble. The cats all wanted to extend their nails so all of their ornaments had little nail dots. Our dog, Biscuit, HATED the whole project! We had to redo his print three times and in the end, got the worse print ever! (Unfortunately, there are no pictures of us doing the paw prints because it took both of us for that project.)

After doing all of the pets, we had extra dough, so I did stars from a cookie cutter and a gingerbread man. I hate wasting! So into the oven they all went at 200 degrees for 2 hours. In the end, here is what came out! (Very ironic that out of all of the ornaments, guess who's cracked so we could not use it...BISCUIT! SMH.)

Stars and Gingerbread Man. We added cinnamon
to the dough to make them smell good. And yes, my G-man has an ascot on!

We used markers to paint the paw prints.
For our black cats, we used black markers. 

I think out of all of our crafts so far, this one turned out to be a success. We are going to get some ribbon and put them on the tree soon, which will complete our ornaments this year.

UPDATE: So two days later, while Hubby and I were getting ready for the day, we heard a huge crash in the kitchen. We rushed in to find the bin of cat food spilled on the floor and half of the ornaments (that we left on the breakfast bar) broken and laying all over the floor. Our cat, Ray, decided that he did not like the ornaments and sought out to destroy them...including HIS!

Needless to say that we will be doing the paw print ornaments again in the next day or two. Sigh.

Make sure to share your pictures if you do this ornament project with your pets or kids. I can't wait to see how yours turn out!

Talk later - XOXO!
Crystal