Colorful Pasta

I won’t buy food with artificial dyes anymore, but I have no qualms about using dyes for our summer of crafts!  I thought we could try making colored pasta shapes for stringing necklaces.

Looks like it's time to make a mess!

I found lots of different “recipes” for coloring pasta, all of which contradicted each other.  So I just winged it!  We put about a cup of pasta in each freezer bag – 1/2 cup each mezzi rigatoni and rotelle (wheels).  Then I took a toothpick and put some of each color on the inside surface of each bag.  Finally, I poured a tablespoon of rubbing alcohol into each bag.

I used the "good" baggies for this: the double-sealed variety!

The girls helped me squish the bags around (I made sure they were well sealed!) to distribute the color, and then we let them sit for a couple of hours.

Poke, poke...are they ready yet?!?

Once we thought the colors were deep enough, we (well, mostly I) spread the pasta out on baking sheets covered with wax paper.  The girls were excited to watch, but Anna thinks the pasta is stinky.  The rubbing alcohol is rather…pungent.  But the pasta dried very quickly, and I imagine will be put to good use tomorrow!

That pasta is *stinky*!

(And my fingers are only a little colorful.)

Love the intense colors!

Oh!  And we found apple raspberry frozen juice concentrate, so hopefully that will work for our sunrise lemonade.  (Lemon-apple-raspberry?  Could be good, could be n0t-so-good.  We’ll find out tomorrow!)  We also acquired a few packets of lemon-lime and berry blue Kool-Aid.  The lady at the checkout seemed fairly taken aback when Carolyn told her we were using it to make playdough.  I suppose that’s not really a “normal” thing to do with Kool-Aid…