More fall fun!

The suspense has been killing you I know.  You have been laying awake at night wondering what I put in those hurricanes on my mantle.  I didn’t want the traditional fall leaves, pumpkins or anything natural looking, which is my norm.  I wanted something whimsical & colorful to go along with my new garland.  Remember this?

Yes, I know you can't really see the garland but with a kid this cute who cares?

So we dyed rice..  I’ve dyed pasta in the past and quite frankly wasn’t impressed with the results.  The colors looked a little anemic and the pasta lost it’s shape.  But I thought an experiement was in order so I bought a 10 lb. bag of cheap white rice, gathered up 2 big bowls, a couple of spoons and some food coloring.   Ten minutes later we were on our way outside after I swept up the rice each kid had flung stirred onto the floor!

Take it from me, dying rice is an outside activity.   Especially since the first step is to dump some rubbing alcohol over the rice.  I picked up a bottle at Wal-mart for less than a dollar that had a squeeze bottle type top on it.  Brilliant I tell you.  The big one did the squeezing.  

Though the tutorial I was using said to be sparing with the alcohol, I wasn't.  We added enough so that the rice all looked damp.  Be prepared to add the food coloring right away, several drops at a time directly on top of the rice.  Stir fast too because the alcohol dries fast, especially in the full sun when it's 100+ degrees!  Just keep stirring until all the rice is dyed.

Plastic grocery bags worked great for setting the rice out in the sun to dry.

For the orange, we added the yellow and red directly to the rice.  It ended up being this awesome variegated irregular blend.  That’s kind of like my sanity most days.  For the brown rice, I knew I wanted a more consistent color so we mixed up in a small bowl a lot of red & yellow food coloring added in some green and a little blue until it looked like a deep reddish brown.  We added some alcohol to the bowl in addition to squirting it on top of the rice.

We ended up dying the brown rice twice b/c it wasn’t dark enough the first time.

Surprisingly dying the rice ended up being a blast.  I can totally see doing this in springy colors for Easter and varying shades of green for St. Pat’s.  And for Halloween, I'm going to layer orange, yellow and white undyed rice for a candy corn look.  Can't wait!