Salt-dough

This is the beginnings of a tea set I'm making for Ben. It's salt dough, made and shaped and baked to an actual recipe, but it's not hardening properly. I'm not sure what I've done wrong. And now I've started painting it so I'm a bit wary about putting it back in the oven at a slightly higher temperature than I did before. Not sure how emulsion paint reacts to oven temperatures, and I'm not in the mood for experimenting like that.

But the tea set itself is an experiment, to see if I can make and shape and bake salt dough properly (which so far the answer to that is "no"), if and when I manage to make something decent I will start all over and make a proper tea set, and a set of letters and numbers, and I'll try my hand at animals, and fruit, and Christmas tree decorations, and anything else I can think of. I had a moment today as I gave the cups their first coat of paint, thinking how amazing it would be for a tea set I had made to become a family heirloom, that Ben could give to his children one day, and say that his mama made it for him when he was a teeny tiny boy.

I'm going to need to buy a bigger bag of salt.