Creative ideas with coloured pasta

Pasta is a kid-friendly kind of meal, and because it’s one of Miss K’s favourites we serve it up at least once a week. When it comes around to grocery shopping time, I always forget how much is in the cupboard and buy another packet “just in case”, until we have ended up with way more of the stuff than we need. On top of that, recently I discovered just how much better the real, fresh pasta from the fridge section tastes over the regular dried variety. I like it so much more that there will be no going back, which has left us with a huge stock pile of dried pasta, taking up way too much space in our cupboard, so I decided to do use it for craft this week with the girls.

I remembered seeing a great recipe for dying pasta a while ago over at Happy Hooligans. I went back to find the recipe and Miss K and I dyed our pasta in lots of different colours. You can find the full recipe here.

The hooligans method calls for reusable containers instead of plastic bags, but we didn’t have enough and so had to go with the less environmentally friendly option. Miss K had a great time mixing the colours and shaking up the pasta to coat it. To dry the pasta out we left it spread across the table over a large sheet of paper, and since our weather is cold at the moment it took about 5 hours to fully dry out.

Once dried, I stored it in clean ziplock bags separated by colour. Then it was time to have some fun…

Making Pasta Pictures

I put the pasta into a divided party platter with some tacky craft glue so the girls could create some pictures with it.

Their “canvas” to create on was a scrap of recycled cardboard.

Miss R (just turned 6) made an image of a fairy by painting the shape with the glue and then sticking the pasta onto it.

But miss K had other ideas…

She used her hands to smear plenty of glue all over her piece of board

…and then she used a piece of pasta to scratch a picture into the glue. She discovered that she could use her hands to rub the picture out and draw another one. Of course, the glue dried clear so the picture “Disappeared”.

Pasta Sensory Bin

Miss K is a big fan of sensory play, so the next day when she was feeling bored I put all of the pasta into a large bin for some sensory fun.

She had been looking forward to this activity since we first dyed the pasta and was pretty excited. She dashed off to choose some toys to include in the sensory bin whilst I set it up for her and came back with two super hero figurines, Wonder Woman and Aqua Man.

Once the heroes were finished saving the day in “Rainbow land” (as Miss K called it), I packed the mixed up rainbow pasta all into one large container ready to be used another day.

More ideas with pasta

• Invitation to play with pasta and play dough by Lauging Kids Learn
• Painting pasta to thread by Picklebums
• Pasta threading for toddlers by Laughing Kids Learn
• Pasta and pipe cleaner reindeer by The Craft Train
• Rainbow pasta threading fun with pipe cleaners by Just for Daisy