I’ve been wanting to get Miss G a wooden beading set for a while now, but had a little idea when passing through the pasta aisle the other day…  Why not just dye some rigatoni noodles bright, fun colours like I used to do for my Kindergarten students?  I love old school art projects and the macaroni necklace is just that. Old school.  Not to mention that dyed noodles aren’t only good for making necklaces…  They’re great for sorting, patterning, crafting, and counting too.  In the past, I’ve always used a combination of liquid food colouring and rubbing alcohol, but since I wanted Grae to be able to dye the pasta with me, I decided we’d try using vinegar instead.  And I’m happy to report that it turned out just fine. Plus, Gracen loved the whole process.  Add that to the fact that it’s super easy and cheap, and what do you have to lose?  Here’s how to make your own coloured pasta…

Add about a sixth of a large bag of rigatoni to a zip-close bag already prepped with 1 teaspoon of vinegar and about 10 drops of liquid food colouring.

Shake like crazy to evenly distribute the colour and absorb all of the moisture.

Then dump the noodles out on a baking sheet and allow to dry.  (If you order your colours right, you can minimize the number of plastic bags you use.  We started with yellow, then did orange in the same bag, and then did the {more orange than anything} red. I had planned to just rinse out the bag and then do the cool colours, but by that time my little monkey had really taken a liking to the shaking bit and our bag was toast.  We started fresh with a new bag, and did green first, then teal, and then blue.)

By the time we’d moved on to the cool colours, I realized it was a smart plan to double bag.  Good thing, because Gracen went crazy.

In the end, this is what our pasta looked like.  As you can see, I got a little carried away with the vinegar when dyeing the blues, but I think they’ll be just fine.  We set the out in the solarium to dry, and hopefully we’ll be able to do something fun with them tomorrow.  By then, I’m fairly certain Miss G will have said, “Papta (pasta) – pretty, pretty, pretty!” and “Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiyeee pretty papta” about a million times.

♥