A souvenir horseshoe hanging over the door will bring prosperity and happiness to the family. You can make such a horseshoe yourself from salted dough, it will not take much time, but it will develop imagination and give a lot of pleasure.
Before preparing the horseshoe, you need to make a salty dough. To do this, take one part fine table salt and two parts flour. To this mixture you need to add PVA glue - about 1-1, 5 tablespoons and water. Then knead an elastic dough so that it does not stick to your hands and is not runny, but does not crumble. The base for the horseshoe is ready. The amount of salt and flour will depend on how large the horseshoe needs to be made. Usually it is enough to take 1 cup of flour and 0.5 cups of salt.
Preparation of the base
The dough should be laid out on a board and rolled out to a thickness of about 0.7 cm. Then cut out a horseshoe figure with a knife. If you doubt the accuracy of this procedure, it is better to make a horseshoe out of cardboard in advance, put a cardboard mold on the dough and cut along the contour. Then the horseshoe will be perfect. There is another way: separate a small piece from the main volume of the dough - it will be used to decorate the craft. Roll the rest into a thick sausage, lay it on the board, bending the ends in a horseshoe shape and press a little against the table to get a flat figure. Smooth its surface.
Now you can start decorating the horseshoe. By itself, such a craft is not of interest, but when small leaves, fruits, figures of people appear on its surface, and it itself sparkles with bright colors, it will be a wonderful product. To decorate the horseshoe, you need to take the remnants of the dough and sculpt decorative elements for the craft out of them - leaves, apples, a bunch of grapes, flowers. For such a small work, patience and diligence will be required, as well as your imagination, but in the end an original craft will be released, which no one else will meet. Now decorate the additional pieces of the horseshoe with patterns using a knife or a stack. Let streaks appear on the leaves, and a pattern on the horseshoe itself. Make holes at the ends of the product so that you can then thread a ribbon or rope through them.
Drying and decorating
Now the craft should be put in the oven or dried by the battery. The oven should be heated with the craft to the lowest temperature; it is better to keep its lid ajar. Let the horseshoe dry for 1 hour on one side, then transfer to the other. Remove the craft from the oven and hold it in the air for about a day, then repeat the procedure in the oven. However, when drying in the oven, there is always a risk that the dough will crack, so it is best to dry the horseshoe by the battery. You will have to dry it, of course, longer - about 5 days, turning the craft over from time to time.
The final step will be to cover the horseshoe with paints, and then with acrylic varnish and sparkles. Each new layer must be applied when the other has already dried. Now the horseshoe is ready, you can thread the tape and hang it on the door.
