Fun & Easy Crafts From the Pasta Dinner

In order to help entertain the preschoolers at last Friday's preschool Pasta Dinner, we had a few craft tables set up with some easy crafts for the kids.  (Of course, I was unable to take pictures, because my little preschooler took my camera off the counter and hid it in her toy box!  Did not discover that until Sunday...  Have to watch that one!)

Aside from covering the tables in white butcher paper and putting out bowls of crayons for the kids to use to their heart's content, I made the suggestion to our "craft person" that we let the kids make their own jack-o-lantern faces since the dinner was so close to Halloween.  My first thought had been to use felt, but then I decided that construction paper would be easier and less expensive -- you can do it either way!  Tracy, who took care of prepping the crafts for us, used a stencil and cut pumpkins out of construction paper (she made 1 pumpkin out of each piece of paper).  Then she took black construction paper and cut different shapes out -- triangles, circles, etc.  She put the different papers out on the table, with glue, and the kids were able to pick out the shapes they wanted and glue them onto the pumpkin to make fun jack-o-lanterns!

The other craft that we did -- because I am admittedly a theme junkie, and this, after all was a pasta dinner -- was pasta necklaces.  We used curling ribbon cut down to size (anything over 12 inches) but you could use yarn, string -- whatever you have handy!  Tracy used a "recipe" that I found on the internet to dye the pasta and the kids really seemed to enjoy making these!  Here is the recipe that we used:

COLORED PASTA FOR CRAFTS
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Use 2 cups of pasta, 2 teaspoons of food coloring and 3 teaspoons of alcohol (rubbing). Mix the alcohol with the food coloring and then add the pasta. Put all in a covered bowl or ziploc bag. Shake slowly, making sure to cover the pasta with the liquid. Spread to dry for several hours. 

The colors in the pasta turned out to be very vibrant and kids and even some parents were wandering around with the festive necklaces on -- my older daughter even made a bracelet!