Noodle This! March is National Noodle Month
Mamma mia! Get your calendars ready… March is National Noodle Month! You know what that means? Time to make some noodle monsters!
This craft is so easy you could do it with your eyes closed. But you might as well make a day of it because it’s so much fun! Put on a pot of water and have some pasta when you’re done! That’s how we celebrate noodle month.
All you’ll need is:
• white decoupage glue (aka Mod Podge)
• a skein of noodle-colored yarn
• some plastic forks
• some googly eyes
• paper plates, wax paper, or aluminum foil
• an active imagination
Next you’ll need to set up a noodle-monster—making station. I happened to have butcher paper on hand so I covered my dining room table with it, but it isn’t totally necessary. (White glue is reasonably easy to wipe up. It also peels off when it dries if you miss a spot.) Set out some bowls and the wax paper, paper plates or foil for setting the completed monsters on. You can cut your yarn in spaghetti-length pieces before you let the kids loose, or if they are old enough to use scissors, let them cut it themselves.
Now the fun part!
Grab some noodles and put them in your bowl. Refrain from eating.
Then add the glue. We poured in glue liberally but you might want to hold back. Maybe use a quarter cup or less per monster. The more glue you use, the longer it will take to dry and if your kids are like mine, they’ll be itching to play with their monsters right away and not want to wait a week for them to dry. (Our monsters took about a day and a half to dry.) Of course drying times will vary depending on the weather and how dry your house is. You could speed up the dry time if you put them in a well-ventilated area, like right in front of a space heater. Just don’t burn your house down, of course.
After you’ve added your glue, mix, mix, mix with your plastic fork. Wrap it up like you would if you were eating a big bowl of noodles, Italian-style.
When you’ve got all your noodles wrapped around your fork, set it on the foil (or wax paper or paper plate) prong-side down. Then you can add eyes! As many or as few as you like.
Noodle monsters come in all shapes and sizes.
The fun doesn’t have to stop there. Why not cook up a batch of noodle bugs for lunch?! You’ve probably seen this around the web. It does seem a little bit gross at first but it is really really fun and creative. All you need are hot dogs and spaghetti noodles. We speared hot dogs for quite a while making all kinds of creations.
Then we popped them in a big pot of boiling water and seven minutes later we had a pot of creepy crawly fun!
Come on, it’s not that gross. Do it for the children! Lighten up and get your pasta on.
