Modern Macaroni Necklaces | Handmade Charlotte

While digging through my bin of pasta noodles for a craft the other day, I was pleasantly surprised to find these fun necklaces that I almost completely forgot about! A few years ago now, I was lucky enough to lend a hand at an Alt Summit craft workshop led by Rachel, Amanda Kingloff, and Jodi Levine where we were making a bunch of different kids crafts but styled for adults. Macaroni necklaces can definitely seem goofy at first, but when you use really neat shapes and fun colors, they can take on a whole different look. I realized we never posted the process for these fun necklaces on the blog, so today we’re sharing tips and tricks on how you can make your own modern macaroni necklaces. These are a fun project for any time of year, but they make especially great DIY gift for Mother’s Day!

what you need:

Dried pasta noodles (various shapes)
Gel food coloring
Rubbing alcohol
Large ziploc bags
Wax paper
Wooden beads
String

how-to:

Step 1
Distribute your pasta noodles into large ziploc bags. You can mix and match different shapes within the bags – each bag will be a different color so keep this in mind if you want specific noodles to be particular colors. You can use any shape of pasta noodles you can find! Supermarkets will have the more common shapes, but home goods stores or specialty grocery stores may have more unusual finds like some of the ones pictured here.

Note: Keep in mind that some of these fancier pasta noodles sometimes come dusted in flour – this is not ideal as it can mess with the food coloring step later, so keep this in mind before using a lot of these. They can work, so no need to avoid them completely, but we suggest doing a test on just a few first.

Step 2
Add about 1 teaspoon of rubbing alcohol into the bag with the pasta.

Step 3
Add in some food coloring! We used gel food coloring for these bright colors but regular food coloring can work too. Keep in mind that if your pasta noodles are yellow to start with, the food coloring will end up more yellow as well. Start by adding just a little bit of food coloring into the bag, zip the top, and then shake and move the pasta around to coat completely. You can add more food coloring if needed.

Step 4
Once the noodles are all colored, open the bag and pour them out onto wax paper to dry. We left ours overnight just to be on the safe side, but yours might not take so long. Inspect the noodles to make sure that there aren’t any blobs of wet food coloring that hasn’t dried – you don’t want to ruin any shirts by mistake!

Step 5
Time to assemble your necklaces! We mixed and matched pasta noodles with unfinished wooden beads for these playfully modern necklaces.

You can also use spray paint or acrylic paint to paint some noodles if you want different colors. The pale pink and pale blue noodles in these photos were spray-painted, and it’s a nice way to break up the more vibrant food-colored noodles. Gold would make a nice accent color too!

Happy crafting!