Dyeing pasta with food colouring and vinegar…

We dyed pasta today!  Have you ever done this?  It’s so cool!!

It’s cold and rainy here today so it was the perfect day for an activity like this.  We used the same method to colour the pasta as I did to colour our rainbow rice a few weeks ago.

Here’s what you’re going to need:

• white vinegar
• food colouring (I used icing gels)
• pasta (we used Rigatoni because it’s hollow, and I wanted the Hooligans to make necklaces with the coloured pasta)
• a container with lid for colouring your pasta in (you could use a ziplock bag as well)
• small dish to mix the vinegar/food colouring

The process:

We divided our pasta in to 5 piles, and the Hooligans picked out the colours that they wanted: purple, green, blue, pink and orange.

For each colour, we mixed a generous blob of colouring with about a tsp of vinegar.  Ok, see the picture below?  See what we mixed our vinegar/colouring in?  I have to confess that I swipe a few of those little ketchup cups every time I’m at McDonald’s.  They’re handy when it comes to stuff like this.  Anyway, mix your vinegar and food colouring until the gel has dissolved, and make sure you’ve used enough colouring.  You want it to be DARK.  Our first batch of purple pasta turned out way too light, and we had to dye it a second time.  No biggie, just sayin’.

Pour your vinegar/colour over your pasta.  Pop the lid on your container, and shake the heck out of it.

Dump your pasta out onto a plate or something (we used sytrofoam meat trays) and let it dry.  I placed ours in front of the fire, and they were completely dry in about a half an hour.

Now, you have this brilliantly coloured pasta for crafting with!  You could make art with it, or use it for a sorting activity, but we made necklaces with ours.  While I was getting the “needles” and wool ready, the Hooligans were busy exploring the pasta, and within seconds, had their fingers adorned with it.

For the necklaces, I tied a foam letter to the end of the wool so the pasta wouldn’t slide right off, and we used our homemade sewing needles again.

Remember these?

Take a straw (I’m using some rubbermaid straws which will last forever), and make a slit in one end.  Thread your yarn through the straw, secure one end in the slit, and you’re good to go!   Making necklaces is a super exercise in fine motor control.  It quite challenged our youngest crafters.  Just look at the concentration.

And there you have it!  Easy, fun and colourful!  Have fun!!