Coloured Pasta

This project has been sitting in my pantry since my sister came home from working in Mexico. I'd call her and ask when that was, exactly, but I'd be embarrassed to share the date with you. Then you might believe the procrastination rumours that are swiriling around out there with my name attached. I might add that the rumours are totally unfounded. Yeesh.

Here's What You Need
1. Rubbing Alcohol.
2. Cutie pasta shapes with holes in 'em. Any size, but I'm dealing with tinies today. Adjust your amounts accordingly.
3. Food Colouring. I used the concentrated gel kind.
4. Zippy bags. One for each colour you plan on making.
5. Wax paper or Tin Foil. After doing both, I liked the tin foil best.
6. Egg carton. Or some other such container to contain the little coloured pastas when they're all pretty.
7. Measures - I used a smidgen, 1 tsp., and a 2 tbsp.
8. Toothpicks. Useful so you don't smear the wet colours or dye your fingers...much.

See? Cutie pasta shapes. Sorry about the blurry. I don't have a fancy camera like Ree. Or Karen.

Ok. Here we go. Into a zippy bag, pour in 2 tsp. of the rubbing alcohol. Then scoop about half a smidgen - use a toothpick - of colour gel in and squish it all up. (see? You thought I was trying to be funny. Didn't know 'smidgen' was an actual amount, didja?)

Then we dumped in about 2 tbsp. of cutie pasta. Squish all that up. Take a few minutes and really roll it around. Make sure all the pasta is equally coated.

Pour the coloured pasta onto a sheet of wax paper. Spread it all out fairly thinly with a toothpick.

Every few minutes, go back and stir up the drying pasta. It sticks a little. But not enough to be annoying. Here we have yellow, green, purple and pink drying.

Raiden found it helpful to cram my flip flops onto his sock feet during this process. Apparently it helps to channel your focus to the appropriate task. It also makes your big toe look amazingly long. Every boy is proud of a long big toe.

For the colours red, orange and blue, we used a sheet of tin foil. Personally, I liked this better. I'm not sure it made any difference in the final product. Speaking of which...

Pretty!

We're done. About two hours from start to clean-up, including drying time. Now, before you go stringing the cutie coloured pasta on a string and wearing it in the rain while sweating, I'd probably check how colourfast it's going to be. I am going to look into sealing the colour somehow before I do too much with my cutie pasta. But enjoy the pics. I couldn't find any to explain the process so I made my own.