Today we’re participating in the Ultimate Blog Swap. You’ll find us posting over at Northern Cheapskate with interesting frugal tips, and we’re excited to welcome Tara from Feels Like Home to Pandora’s Deals:
This is an awesome project because it didn’t cost a single cent. I used leftovers and odds and ends that we had lying around to dye rice and to make the finished project.
It was really fun for me, but my almost-4-year-old thought it was boring. I think an older kid, maybe 7 or 8, would think it was a fun project from start to finish.
Dying Rice
After dying Easter eggs, we had six bowls full of dye sitting on our dining room table.
Throwing it out seemed like a huge waste, so I came up with a crafty idea – use it to dye something. We dyed pasta last summer and still have some sitting around, so I didn’t want to dye any more, but rice! Rice seemed like a great idea.
My husband mentioned that we had some (very old) brown rice in the pantry cupboard, so we poured that into the dye. When he was looking for the brown rice, he also found a bit of jasmine rice leftover from… something. We poured that in, too.
Then we went to an Easter egg hunt. And to the mall. I have no idea how long the rice was in the dye.
Later that day, I remembered the rice and dumped it, one color at a time, into a strainer.
I lined a stoneware pan with paper towels and poured the rice from the strainer onto the paper towels to dry.
After the rice was sufficiently dry, I put it into a zip-top bag. I poured all of the rice into one bag, but I wish I had kept it separated by color. That would have made my project go so much more smoothly.
Making a Dyed Rice Mosaic
We dyed the rice way back in April. This week, we used it to make a project.
For our rainbow mosaic, we used the dyed rice, construction paper, markers, and some craft glue. That’s it!
The first step is to draw your design. Grace wanted to make a puppy, but I talked her into a rainbow since my artistic skills are sorely lacking. You could also print out a coloring page from the internet and fill that in with dyed rice.
The next step is to fill a small section of your design with glue and then cover the glue with dry dyed rice.
After about ten minutes, Grace pronounced my mosaic project to be boring, a pronunciation that saddened me greatly. I had to finish the rainbow by myself.
I got a chunk of the rainbow finished before Grace needed my attention.
Don’t tell anyone, but my husband really enjoys crafty projects like this. He offered to help me finish the mosaic. The only problem? He’s colorblind and in denial. If you look closely at the almost finished rainbow below, you may notice that 2/3 of one stripe of the rainbow is the wrong color.
The last step was to fill in the clouds with something fluffy and white. If you wanted to keep the mosaic idea going, you could use plain white rice to fill in the clouds. I wanted puffy-looking clouds, so I glued on some cotton balls that I’d pulled apart.
That’s it! The mosaic is finished.
Tara is a wife and mother of two small girls who left a 10-year career as a high school science teacher to be an at-home mom, professional blogger and social media consultant. She has been publishing Feels Like Home since 2007, where she encourages her readers through a variety of posts: food and cooking tips, craft ideas, home management hints, and a myriad of parenting (mis)adventures that help make her readers’ lives easier – or at least make them laugh.
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