Craft fail: Bicarbonate of soda and cornflour dough ornaments

Bicarbonate of soda and cornflour dough ornaments:

You can blame Pinterest for this one again! I was going to make salt dough ornaments as my wedding favours but then I read a few blogs which lead me to trying this purer, whiter dough instead. Big mistake.

You can find recipes for bicarbonate of soda dough all over the internet. Here are the dry ingredients:

It took me 3 tubs of the bicarbonate to make up 2 cups (it's all in American measurements!) and about half a pack of the cornflour.

Measure out the dry ingredients and bung them in a saucepan.

Add the water and stir it all up. There are little, black bits in my mixture which are the coating of my "non-stick" saucepan. Luckily, they didn't really show in the final dough but I should probably have taken this as a warning to give up!

Heat it on a medium heat until it starts to thicken. Keep heating until it starts to come together as a dough.



Leave it cool (takes quite a while) before tipping it out and making a ball. Knead it until it's smooth.

At this stage, it looks gorgeous! This might work! It could be fantastic! No. It's all lies.

I rolled it out and cut out some shapes.....it was too soft to hold a shape. So I threw a strop and put the ball of dough in the fridge for a couple of hours.

This helped a bit and I re-rolled the dough and re-cut out the shapes and laid them out on a baking tray to dry.

A few days later, they started to crack. You can dry them out in the oven on a low heat but I would think this would make the cracking even worse!

Ok, so they are lovely and white in colour, but the texture is crap. Cracked and quite brittle.
Most of these went in the bin and I still have a large ball of dough in the fridge. What a waste of five quid and my time!

I then went back to the shops and spent more money on some Das air dry clay, which I know works because I used it to make my Xmas ornaments.

Don't even bother trying this craft as it is a waste of money!!!

Unless..... you can send me some pictures of how it's worked for you....and tell me where I went wrong!