Kitchen Floor Crafts: Polar Bear Ornament

As a blogger, it's always so fun to participate in a blog series with other bloggers as you get so many new ideas! That's how I've felt checking out all of the posts in the 10 Days of Kid-Made Ornament series hosted by Mama Miss. Every day it's been running I've found another idea that I love. And even better, all the ornaments are based on books so I've also found several books I'm looking forward to reading too!

For our post in the series we were excited to create an ornament inspired by the book "Santa Claus and the Three Bears."

Of course a polar ornament, or more specifically making sure we had at least three polar bears, seemed like a great ornament fit.

This book, which is based on the traditional tale, has three polar bears who go out for a walk while their Christmas pudding cools. While they are out, Santa Claus arrives and accidentally causes some mischief. Luckily, the ending is a happy one for all the characters involved.

For our ornament we decided to use baking soda clay. We've used baking soda clay several times in the past, including last year to create our Mitten ornaments. We love how crisp and white the clay is. For this project we needed a bear, and although we do have a pretty amazing cookie cutter collection, we still didn't have a bear. I was able to find one easily through Amazon.

The ingredients for baking soda clay are pretty simple: 1 cup baking soda, 1/2 cup cornstarch, and 3/4 cup water. For complete directions on how to make the dough, click here.

Once the dough was made the boys took turns coming over to roll out the dough and cut out the bear shapes.

They then used a bamboo skewer to make a hole through the bear (which would later be used for a hanging ribbon.) The also used the skewer to gently press one eye into the face of the bear.

Finally we took a little bit of white glitter and sprinkled it onto the bear. We gently patted the glitter onto the bear to help it stick a little.

We baked our bear ornaments at 175 degrees for 2 and a half hours.

Important to Note: Other people often recommend air drying baking soda clay projects for several days. We've had success baking ours in the past, but this shape seemed a little trickier and a few of the bears did crack during baking. Next time we're going to try air drying the ornaments.

One trick we've discovered if you are baking them is to turn the oven off and leave the tray in the oven until it cools. Removing the ornaments too quickly from the oven can cause even more cracking.

When the bears were dry we threaded red ribbon through the holes so they could hang from a tree.