I found a great receipe on pintrest today for making your own gift tags.
You will need:
1 cup Salt
2 cups all purpose baking flour
1 cup lukewarm water
Choose a shape and treat dough mixture just as you would a cookie.
Be sure to make a hole in one end for your ribbon or twine to go thru.
Bake on 300 for 5 to 8 minutes or until hard. Be careful not to overcook or burn!
Allow to cool then take your favorite rubber stamp and ink and stamp away!
Voila! Instant Gift tags or Ornaments.
Only these aren’t made of Salt Dough.
It seems that an over eager pinner on Pintrest got it into their head that money grows on trees and that all things made by artists can be reproduced at home with a little wit and ingenuity. So someone added the receipe above to a picture from this website and offered up their own idea on how to recreate the artists work. It turns out that the tags pictured above are made of earthenware clay and are not salt dough at all. While this may not deter everyone from trying to make their own, especially since salt dough receipes have been around for years, it does deter me for the time being.
What this makes makes me think of is how protective and downright vicious people can be about ideas we deem to belong to us. Someone saw a beautiful picture of someone elses home based business. Rather than purchase an item, she or he said to themselves, I can make that! And the website link above tells the story of how many people contacted the artist attempting to figure out why their salt dough receipes didn’t turn out. Had she used a secret ingredient? Was the receipe flawed in some way? The blog author and artist goes to great lengths to assure readers and pintrest followers who found their way to her page that it is not Salt Dough, but Earthenware Clay.
Now I don’t want to burst anyones bubble, but someone swiped that picture and lied.
An artist has a right to a return on revenue if she so chooses to sell rather than enjoy her own work and people have the right to try to outwit those they deem to be the competition. But sometimes, being cheap isn’t the best option.
Ashley M Heidi Carter 
Thank you SOOOO much for your support on this. It still to this day comes up everyday…pinners asking why their tags didn’t turn out like my copyrighted ones! It is tricky. I feed my children with the hours and hours I put into these pieces, own my own kiln and have a fulltime business from what I make and to see it pinned still today (and numerous items from my store) with that same salt dough recipe can do my head in sometimes…answering the same types of questions. So, I really do appreciate your commentary on this.
Warmest,
Ness -Marley & Lockyer…owner + designer of above ceramic pieces xx
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Thanks for noticing! I really loved the look of your tags and to be honest, who would want to waste their time trying something that is simply not going to work! Salt Dough can be fun and I remember it from when I was a kid making things with my mother but I also remember some of it just not turning out. The closest I think someone could come to copying you would be to use sculpey but yours are worth buying and that is just obvious! Why not give credit where it is due and bite the bullet and save the money for the real thing.
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Thanks for this info — I am so sorry the Artist got ripped off — really sucks there are some dishonest people out there!
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This is my most viewed post on this blog. I remember my mom and I and my sister making salt dough ornaments. I don’t think we made too many or saved more than one or two of them when we were very small. I thought these were beautiful! Sometimes you have to spend a little money to have something nice. It’s like my step mother taught me about clothes for the most part. You may pay more for coture but you keep it for 15 years too!
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