Salt Dough Runes
Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2013 12:28 pm
Hi everyone, recently I was in a workshop about the Elder Futhark runes, which inspired me to try my hand at making some runes. As someone who loves to cook and feels much more comfortable working with flour rather than baking clay, I made them out of salt dough and painted them with acrylic.
This is how I did it:
Salt Dough Recipe*:
4 cups flour
1 cup salt
1.5 cups warm water
Mix the flour and salt in a mixing bowl using a wooden spoon, gradually adding water until it forms a big sticky mess. Finish mixing with your hands.
Transfer the dough onto a floured work surface, and knead for about 10 minutes until the dough is soft, pliable, and smooth.
Roll it out until it is 1/8" thick; cut out the desired shapes. In my case, I used the lid of a candle jar (I don't have a cookie cutter ... lol) to cut out discs that were 1 inch in diameter.
Etch the runes using a toothpick or other such instrument. (You should do this part as soon as you can; if you let it dry it even a little bit, your etchings will start cracking the top of the dough and mess up what you are trying to carve)
Bake in an oven at 300 degrees Fahrenheit until it is hard; for me, this was about 2 hours.
Paint as desired. I used black acrylic paint for the discs and silver metallic paint for the runes.
This is the final result:
Hope you guys find this useful!
* this quantity of salt dough will make you a helluva lot of runes; when I rolled it all out and cut them into 1-inch circles, it made about 80 pieces. I made 24 Elder Futhark runes, and 41 runes from Shekhinah Mountainwater's Womanrunes system, but because the Womanrunes use some more involved pictographs, they didn't turn out well, and all I was left with was the Elder Futhark runes. So anyways, if I were just making the Elder Futhark runes, half of the original recipe would be plenty, with leftover scraps if you wanted to make other ornaments and such.
This is how I did it:
Salt Dough Recipe*:
4 cups flour
1 cup salt
1.5 cups warm water
Mix the flour and salt in a mixing bowl using a wooden spoon, gradually adding water until it forms a big sticky mess. Finish mixing with your hands.
Transfer the dough onto a floured work surface, and knead for about 10 minutes until the dough is soft, pliable, and smooth.
Roll it out until it is 1/8" thick; cut out the desired shapes. In my case, I used the lid of a candle jar (I don't have a cookie cutter ... lol) to cut out discs that were 1 inch in diameter.
Etch the runes using a toothpick or other such instrument. (You should do this part as soon as you can; if you let it dry it even a little bit, your etchings will start cracking the top of the dough and mess up what you are trying to carve)
Bake in an oven at 300 degrees Fahrenheit until it is hard; for me, this was about 2 hours.
Paint as desired. I used black acrylic paint for the discs and silver metallic paint for the runes.
This is the final result:
Hope you guys find this useful!
* this quantity of salt dough will make you a helluva lot of runes; when I rolled it all out and cut them into 1-inch circles, it made about 80 pieces. I made 24 Elder Futhark runes, and 41 runes from Shekhinah Mountainwater's Womanrunes system, but because the Womanrunes use some more involved pictographs, they didn't turn out well, and all I was left with was the Elder Futhark runes. So anyways, if I were just making the Elder Futhark runes, half of the original recipe would be plenty, with leftover scraps if you wanted to make other ornaments and such.