At the moment, term time weekends usually involve a significant amount of preparation for our Monday morning craft session at the West Bergholt Baby and Toddler group. The craft this week has had me dyeing and drying pasta and rice all week though. It's the first time I've tried dyeing pasta and it took a fair amount of experimentation before I got it down to a fine art.
I tried using food colouring but the results were very variable so I decided to try liquid watercolours. I mixed a squirt of colour with five squirts of hand sanitizer (apologies for the lack of scientific measures!) in a ziplock bag before adding a few handfuls of pasta or rice and shaking/rubbing the bag to distribute the colour. I have read that the alcohol in the sanitizer helps to spread the colour evenly and I believe vinegar works in much the same way. I'm really pleased with the results of these and will definitely do it this way again.
So, the craft itself. We're making pasta suncatchers. I've been collecting plastic lids for months! Jess and I have had a couple of trial runs this week and they seem to work quite well. We spread a layer of PVA glue (mixed with a small amount of glitter glue) onto a plastic lid and then stick pasta and rice on top.
That's it. Leave them to dry for a couple of days and they start peeling off the lid. Once you've eased them off you can pierce a hole and thread some string through to hang it up in the window. I have finally been allowed to take our Halloween pieces down to make room for these!
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