Pasta Rainbow Necklaces (Tutorial)

Allow me to briefly detour from my usual sewing and fabric printing posts. It's birthday time around here. In a week, I am hosting my daughter's sixth birthday party. She requested party games and crafts based on horses, pegasus and unicorns. She drew the illustration for her invitations and it was this wonderfully creative rainbow unicorn. Since she is a big time horse lover, she has already had a birthday party with a horse theme so, inspired by this card, I asked if we could include a rainbow craft and she conceded.

I decided to dye pasta in the colors of the rainbow and have the girls make jewelry with them. If you haven't dyed pasta before, here is what I did. I grabbed a ziploc plastic bag and added about a tablespoon of rubbing alcohol and then at least 8 drops of food coloring (in order to get the saturated colors I was looking for). I added a couple of handfuls of dry pasta, sealed the bag and shook them around a bit. Then I dried them on paper towel lined cookie sheets. I didn't want to use 7 plastic bags as that seemed really wasteful so I used one bag for red, then I reused it for orange just adding more yellow food coloring than red since there was already some in the bag. You can do that for all the secondary colors.

I decided to add a little glitz to some of the "beads." I happen to have glitter glue in all the colors of the rainbow. I love glitter glue because it allows you to use glitter without the mess of glitter and it doesn't flake off children's projects and end up all over the house. I painted the pasta with glitter glue in the matching color and stood them on end on waxed paper to dry.
I would have loved to make jewelry with these when I was six. Let's hope it is a hit!