Saturday, April 6, 2013

Leftover Egg Dye for Pasta Crafts

Because I am A) crafty and B) cheap, I've gotten in the habit of asking myself before I throw something away, "Can I use this for anything?" Now I'm well aware that this is a method that could lead you towards becoming a hoarder, so if the answer to the question is yes, then I set specific limits. When will I be able to use it and is the saving it worth the hassle of storing it. More often than not though, if I save it, I do end up putting it to use. After dyeing eggs I had the thought before tossing all of that dye if there was anything I could use it for, but I wasn't interested in any time consuming hand dyed fabrics. Plus I didn't want this dye sitting around on the counter (an accident waiting to happen) so I chose a quick result : dyeing pasta. This was super easy and came out better than I expected. 


I didn't have any elbow macaroni like I was hoping to use to make necklaces, so I just used what we had. 

I didn't time how long I left it in, since I figured the longer the better, but it was at least 20 minutes. You can see we put in some rice and split peas as well, just to experiment with how different textures absorbed the dye. I thought the rice would be brighter, but it was still pretty pale in color compared to the pasta. 

We did the basic colors and then..

practiced mixing some colors. The color mixing was a fun bonus teaching moment and the paper towels left fun tie dyed patterns that my daughter loved.
They came out so bright and could be used for lots of crafts including gluing onto shapes or letters. I intended to do something like that, but my daughter preferred just free play of making shapes and letters on the table. Definitely would give this a try again next Easter, maybe using some spiral pasta and some cut penne or elbow macaroni for fun jewelry!

No comments:

Post a Comment