Salt dough ornaments

basic salt dough
1 cup fine-grained salt
¾ cup very warm tap water, or a smidge more
2 cups flour
1 Tbsp. cooking oil (for a smoother dough)

For colored salt dough, you'll also need some food coloring. The cheapie liquid kind works, but you may find you need to add a smidge more flour to keep the dough workable. Alternatively, the pricier concentrated gel paste food coloring will give you the brightest, deepest hues without adding much liquid to the mix.
spiced salt dough

For a yummy smell and a naturally pretty brown hue, try this variation.
1 cup fine-grained salt
¾ cup very warm tap water, or a smidge more
1½ cups flour
½ cup cinnamon
1 tsp. nutmeg
1 Tbsp. cooking oil

1 Whichever version of the dough you're using, combine the salt and warm water in a big mixing bowl; stir well until the water turns cloudy and the salt is just about dissolved. Stir in the oil.
2 In another bowl, add the flour. If you're making the spiced dough, you'll also want to stir in the spices with a fork, until well combined.
3 Add the flour/flour mixture to the liquid a little at a time, and use a wooden spoon to work it in. The mixture will start to clump up; when the spoon stops doing anything, switch to your hands and start kneading. You want to get the dough to the point where it feels cohesive and has some elasticity to it; this'll take at least five minutes or so of kneading, and as much as ten. You may find that you need to add a smidge more water to get the dough soft and pliable; add the water just a few drops at a time as needed. When the dough starts to come together, it also helps to switch to kneading on the countertop rather than in the bowl.
4 At this point, if you're working with the basic salt dough and want to create some pretty colors, separate the dough into however many colors you want. Get yourself some rubber gloves and put them on, as working with food coloring tends to produce a bit of a mess. Place a lump of dough in a stainless steel (or other non-porous, non-food-coloring-absorbing) bowl; drop some food coloring on the dough. Work the coloring into the dough, kneading until you have a nice uniform color, and adding more food coloring as necessary until you're happy with the hue. Bear in mind that colors will fade a lot once the dough is baked, so it's best to get the colors fairly vivid. If the dough starts getting sticky from the liquid in the food coloring, add in a little more flour as necessary.
5 Store the bits of dough in a tightly sealed container, or wrapped snugly in plastic wrap, until you're ready to use.
getting creative

Once you're ready to start shaping ornaments, you have a couple of options. The easy, no art skills required method is to roll out the dough and use cookie cutters to form decorative shapes. For those who like to get a little more creative, however, there's also the freeform sculpting option; just treat the dough like clay, and mold the dough into whatever shape you like.
For both methods, it's best to pull out only a little dough at a time to work with, keeping the remaining dough covered. This is especially true if you're getting elaborately sculpty with your dough and laboring lovingly over each one; you don't want the dough to dry out before you get a chance to work with it.
With the cookie cutter method, roll out the dough to the desired thickness -- I like ¼" or so, which is just thick enough to make the ornament nice and sturdy without turning it into a total lead weight. As you're rolling the dough, periodically lift and rotate the dough to make sure it's not sticking to the surface. Once it's rolled, use your cookie cutters to cut out whatever shapes you like. Transfer the cutouts to a foil-lined baking sheet. Now use a straw, chopstick or whatever other skinny implement you can find to poke a hole near the top of the ornament; this is very important, as it gives you a way to hang up the ornament once it's done. You can bake as is, and either leave plain or decorate with paint after the ornaments are baked. Alternatively, for a more 3D effect, try decorating the cookie with appliquéd bits of dough. For my Christmas tree ornament, for example, I rolled tiny little balls of dough to create ornaments; at each point on the tree where I wanted to place an ornament, I simply brushed on a little bit of water (this acts as a sort of glue), then gently pressed the ornament into place. I also used the straw to produce additional decorative holes in ornaments.
The sculpting method allows you even more freedom to exercise your artsy-fartsy instincts. As this method generally involves sticking together lots of little pieces of dough, it's best to assemble the ornament directly on the foil-lined baking sheet, to avoid the potential hassle of having to transfer a complex creation from counter to pan. It's also good to make sure the bottoms of the ornaments are dusted with some flour to keep them from sticking; when you press down the main "body" of each ornament (the base section upon which you'll build up the ornament), lightly flour the bottom. As with the cookie cutter ornaments, you can then use a little bit of water to "glue" on additional bits of dough. And as with the cookie cutter-style ornaments, don't forget to poke a hanging hole in each of your masterpieces.
the great bake-off
Once you've filled up your tray with ornaments (you can pack them in fairly close, as these won't really expand as they bake), you're ready to pop them in the oven, which should be preheated to 250F. Some recipes for salt dough ornaments call for a higher baking temperature, but upping the dial can result in unsightly cracks and browning of the dough, so I prefer to stick with the lower, safer temps.
Bake until the cookies have hardened -- this can take four hours or even more, depending upon the thickness of the ornaments. You'll want to check on the ornaments from time to time, and flip them over once the top side is mostly hardened to ensure that the bottom dries out as well. As the ornament bakes the colors will lighten as the moisture is cooked off; dark patches generally indicate spots that still have some moisture. If the drying process seems to be taking particularly long, you can also help speed up the process by removing the mostly-dried ornaments from the baking sheet, and placing them directly on the oven's wire rack (provided the wires aren't spread so far apart that your ornaments fall through). Having both sides exposed to the warm air should help speed things along somewhat.
the finish
After you've finished baking the ornaments into a sufficiently hardened state, let them sit out on wire drying racks for another day or two (this ensures that they'll really be fully dried-out). At this point, you can use paint to add whatever details you like to your ornaments, or leave them as is. It's also a nice touch to add initials and date to the back of each ornaments (fine-point permanent marker is easier to work with than paint for this purpose). Whether you've decided to paint or not, you'll want to finish off your little works of art by giving them a couple of coats of clear varnish (either paint-on or spray varieties). The varnish will add an extra protective layer to keep your ornaments preserved for years; if you choose a gloss variety, it'll also add a nice shine to the ornaments and perk up the colors to boot.
Of course, you're not quite done yet. Remember that hole you made a point to remember to poke at the top of each ornament? Time now to put it to use. Take a 9" length of narrow ribbon; bring the ends of the ribbon together and tie into a knot. You'll have a lovely little loop of ribbon. Pull the loop end of the ribbon through the hole in the ornament, so that you have the loop on one side and the knot on the other. Bring the knot end through the loop, and pull taut. Voila -- pop your ornament on your tree and admire it for years to come, or wrap it up as a lovely gift for someone else to enjoy!