Colored Pasta Fun

Babygirl has been sick and we've been under house arrest these past couple days waiting to hear what the diagnosis is. Leave it to her to be active, happy and playful despite being sick! Thankfully it was nothing more than the common cold, but we did have to keep ourselves entertained. 

In the past week or so Babygirl has discovered that you can put things IN containers (or mommy's mouth, or shoes...) instead of just taking them out. It's actually kind of fun to find her little hidden treasures around the house. So it seemed a perfect time to practice these skills with some pasta. And who doesn't love a little color!

So I'll admit I'm not good at planning ahead when it comes to crafts. These aren't ready to play with right away, but she loved playing with the plain noodles while I made the colored ones. She even helped a bit along the way. 

First you'll want to grab your supplies. You'll need some vinegar (I used white wine vinegar because that's just what I had on hand), plastic zip loc bags, food coloring, baking paper and dry noodles of your choice. We got a bunch of pasta when it was on sale for $1 a bag, so it's very inexpensive and that's important when you're on a budget. You can do this with all kinds of noodles. The different shapes could make for some fun necklace making and sorting activities for older kids. We had a couple containers as well as a measuring cup to use to practice pouring and picking up the noodles. I also decided to color some rice for future projects since I had all the supplies out (yay for planning ahead!)

Divide up your noodles evenly between your plastic bags. I made four colors, therefore 4 plastic bags, each with about a cup of penne pasta. 

Add about 2 tsp of vinegar and 5-10 drops of food coloring to each bag. You don't want to add too much vinegar or it gets soggy, so I suggest doing one color at first to test out the amount of vinegar. Then zip up the bags and mix it up really well to evenly distribute the color.

Babygirl loved helping me mix them up! Just be careful, that food coloring is messy! 

Once mixed, dump out the noodles onto some baking paper. You'll want a nice flat layer and to space them out some so they dry faster. These took a couple hours to dry inside, but it's pretty humid here (my Arizona peeps could set these outside for maybe 10min and they'd be good to go!). 

Repeat the process with your other colors (and watch out for little miss "I eat everything!")

 I'm lazy and cheap when it comes to crafts so I decided to color some rice since everything was out and the bags were already dirty. I used the exact same process and added about a cup of rice to the bags with more coloring. I used brown rice because that's what we have on hand and I think the colors came out pretty great. White rice probably would have resulted in even brighter colors. We will use the rice for something fun another day. 

As for the noodles, we will keep practicing picking them up and watching them fall and putting them in bowls. You can have fun sorting the different colors, threading string through them, counting with them, making noodle pictures, even cook them up and eat them...the possibilities are endless!