Craft Time: Macaroni Necklaces

The boys beg to do a craft every single day, which is fine with me because I love to craft & hubby does as well. We're a bunch of crafting fools in this house.

I found some boxes of macaroni & cheese in the pantry that smelled weird (I'm big on smells) & didn't want to cook with it, but didn't want to waste it either. I poured the dry macaroni into a cake pan for the boys to play with. They entertained themselves by burying their hands & toys, mounding it up into hills & making it rain macaroni. That was fun enough, but then I thought of something we could make with it: macaroni necklaces! So stylish. I remember making them in elementary school. I knew the boys would love it.

Larry & I started talking about how we could color the macaroni. I thought about letting them paint it or use markers to color it. I brought it up to my mom & she said that all I had to do was add a few drops of food coloring to the macaroni and let it dry.

I got the food coloring down from the cabinet & grabbed some baggies. I also grabbed the plastic wrap. ;)

 

We used macaroni, but any kind of pasta would work great. I'm already thinking of the possibilities. Wouldn't a painted snowman look cute with a red bowtie pasta bow on his neck? :)

What you'll need:       

• dry pasta
• food coloring
• baggies
• plastic wrap

 

Put a handful of the dry pasta into the baggy.
Yes, I used breastmilk storage bags. I don't ever have time to pump, so the two million breastmilk storage bags that I have will never get used up. This was a perfect opportunity to use them. ;)

Add a few drops (I started with about 5) of food coloring to the pasta. The bigger the pasta pieces, the more dye you'll need to start with.

Seal and shake the bag to coat the pasta. Add more food coloring, a few drops at a time, if any pieces of the pasta aren't coated well. Some of the colors took almost 15 drops of food coloring before I was happy with the result.

I poured the macaroni out onto small pieces of plastic wrap so it could dry, because it does get a little wet from the food coloring. It was completely dry within a few hours.

We were able to make red, green & blue, but the yellow didn't look right. It wasn't bright at all. I'm guessing that's because the macaroni is already kind of yellow to begin with. We made orange instead, by adding a few drops of red along with the yellow. We made brown by mixing green with red, & a kind of teal color by mixing blue with green. We tried for purple, but mixing the blue & red resulted in a jet black color- pretty cool anyway.

As far as the necklaces go, I found this stretch bead cord in one of our craft boxes. The boys were able to string the macaroni onto it all by themselves.

 

Demitri made a red macaroni necklace, while Sylas used some of each color for his. 

 

FYI: if the macaroni gets wet the color will come off and can stain. So don't let it get wet, unless you're into that sort of thing.

Pass the sugar please. But please don't.

There are two types of people in this world. Those with a sugar tooth, and those with a ...salty tooth? I was always one to go for the salty options- chips, beef jerky, cheese. My mom used to tell me that I took after her in that department. Neither of us has ever had much of a sweet tooth.

Then I got pregnant with my third child, and something in me changed. Not to mention that every single thing about my pregnancy with my daughter was different than my pregnancies with my boys, I wanted nothing but sweet stuff. I wanted waffles for breakfast every morning. I ate cookies & cream ice cream pretty much every night after dinner. I became obsessed with giant blueberry muffins from the bakery. I was a fiend for anything sweet! I figured these were pregnancy cravings, but they haven't stopped since I had Olive in December.

While the intense cravings have gone away (lol), I just had waffles for breakfast AGAIN. Damn it, they sounded so good! As I gobbled up my plate of buttery, syrup-sticky waffles I thought: "I need to kill this sweet tooth." I haven't lost any pregnancy weight, and I know that the sugar isn't helping matters! So far I've been blaming breastfeeding; I really feel like it's coming in to play here. I just want to eat all the time and I never feel full. It's annoying.

My will-power seems to have taken a hiatus, so next time I run in to you at the store and you notice that my cart is filled with nothing but ice cream, muffins, and brownie mix... don't judge me. I'm judging myself enough for the both of us!! Ugh.

Signed,
Sugar Mama
(but not in the sense that I have money)

My sweet boys..

Demitri and Sylas have been doing something new lately... sleeping together, and it's so cute that I can hardly handle it. The other night, Larry & I put them to bed (in their separate beds, like always) and said goodnight. When we went in to check on them later, they were in bed together.

 
This is the second time they've done it, and in Sy's bed again. So funny!

When we asked about it the next morning, Demitri said that Sylas asked him to come sleep with him.

Demitri also said that there wasn't enough room for his pillow so they just shared Sylas', but that next time he'll need to bring his own blanket because Sylas always steals the covers... haha :)

Olive's Graduation!

Every parent finds themselves saying it over and over... "I can't believe my baby has gotten so big!" Well, today I found myself saying it for the millionth time. My little Olive graduated...

...from rice cereal to oatmeal cereal, and she loved it!!! She has done so well with adding solids. We've been going at cereal for two weeks now, and from day one she was ready and excited. Demitri and Sylas did good with it when they were babies too, but I get the feeling that Olive likes it more than they did. They would have liked for me to skip the cereal and go straight to the veggies!

Such a lady. :) (That's Sylas in the background watching TV... lol.)