Rainbow Rice Party

It's all fun and games til someone spits up in the rainbow rice!

I thought we'd have a little fun today and play with the rainbow rice Raina and I made last weekend.  We made it by scooping plain old white rice into sandwich sized ziploc baggies (about 4 cups per bag), squeezing a few droops of food coloring into each bag, adding 2 tablespoons of rubbing alcohol, and SHAKE SHAKE SHAKING until the rice was all coated in color and our arms and legs were tired out from the shake it up dance :)

I realize these pictures show nothing except playing with rice.  The actual process of pouring rice into bags required assistance, and I was not able to provide said assistance while operating a picture taking device :)

this is taina after we added the food coloring.  it got on her hands and then she rubbed her face.   did you know blue food coloring is a beast to get off skin?

We ended up with bags like this (that we let dry for about a week... probs doesn't take that long for it to dry, but we got busy!)

I set up the kitchen table with some scooping, pouring, and "Rice Tea" (get it?!) goodies, poured out the rice into a nice shallow container, and let her go to town!  Raina was in heaven.  She played by herself for about 35 minutes (amazing!) before I joined in the fun (more on what I was working on in a soon to be written post!)

we even planted some flowers!

Even Meow got in on the fun!  Oh meow, you're such a good sport!

This toy was so much fun, but it made a huge mess!  I did not expect the rice to fly as far as it did!

Questions, answered:
Did it make a mess?   Yeah, it made a giant stinkin' mess.  But a totally worth it mess!  Besides, dry rice is really not hard to clean up, and Raina helped with that part, too!  (I tape a 1 foot by 1 foot square off on the kitchen floor, give her a dustpan and broom, and have her sweep messes into the square!  It makes cleaning a game!)

Did the color come off on our hands?  Nope!

Are we going to eat it now?  Absolutely not!  This was my husband's question, and I think it was a joke :)  I suppose you could make and eat colored rice, but you should probably omit the rubbing alcohol!  :)