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.