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OOh! Check out my latest score from the craft section of Powell’s Books. It’s Too Good to Eat: the Art of Dough Sculpture, by Karen Mergeler. Printed in 1972. You can’t see this in the photo, but the cover is embossed — the pig, and all those flowers. Oh, my.
So many of my crafty childhood memories center on homemade dough. It’s a mixture of flour, salt, and water, and then you form it and bake it to harden. For a while, I made and baked batches of this stuff almost every day, and was forever using up all the salt in the house.
There’s a whole section in this book about forming different kinds of mushrooms — a handy skill to have when forming homemade dough. It’s also good to know how to mount your creations onto wooden plaques. We did a ton of plaque-mounting in the 70′s.
You could also brush some canned milk or egg yolk over your sculpture before baking, to give it a nice brown, breadlike finish.
. . . And this was my favorite thing as a kid — putting your dough through a garlic press to make rag-doll hair, or lions’ manes, or sun rays.
I’m so unreasonably excited about all this, I think I’m going to do a podcast about it. So — fair warning. Start collecting your wooden plaques now.
Oh please do. I had a book with tons of pictures of dough animals when i was a kid in the 70s. I tried making things out of it a couple of times, but mine were never as nice as the photos.
Oh please do. I had a book with tons of pictures of dough animals when i was a kid in the 70s. I tried making things out of it a couple of times, but mine were never as nice as the photos.
i made a lot of things with homemade dough too! my mom and i were so into it! we had a lots and lots of dough ornaments!
i made a lot of things with homemade dough too! my mom and i were so into it! we had a lots and lots of dough ornaments!
OMG! Those pictures bring back memories– I was just a wee thing in the 70′s but sculpting dough was the highlight of my childhood.
Our tacky plastic and aluminum Christmas tree had so many dough ornaments made with cookie cutters, pasta roller and garlic press.
OMG! Those pictures bring back memories– I was just a wee thing in the 70′s but sculpting dough was the highlight of my childhood.
Our tacky plastic and aluminum Christmas tree had so many dough ornaments made with cookie cutters, pasta roller and garlic press.