Pasta Shovel-Nosed Snake

I wasn't thrilled with how my pasta version of a coral snake turned out, but am much happier with this shovel-nosed snake, also made from dried pasta. I swapped mezzi rigatoni for penne, which made a huge difference. Photographing it in the backyard instead of on a piece of construction paper helps, too. 

My pasta version of the shovel-nosed snake is actually a little longer than the real thing. A shovel-nosed snake (which is completely harmless to humans) typically reaches a maximum length of 11-17 inches. 

 

Pasta Shovel-Nosed Snake

Materials:

• approx. 20 pieces of mezzi ritagoni
• glue gun
• acrylic paint

Steps: 

Put a thin line of hot glue just along the inner edge of a piece of mezzi rigatoni, then press a second piece to it. Keep going until you are happy with the length of the snake.

Lifting the snake as little as possible, paint every other piece of rigatoni yellow. Then paint the remaining pieces black. 

When the paint is dry, turn the snake upside down. Reinforce all the joints with a thin line of hot glue (this won't show from the top). Turn your snake back over. That's all there is to it!

Pasta Happy Face

Edible crafts don't have to be unhealthy. I turned a well-balanced weeknight pasta dinner into a smily face. It didn't take any extra time, beyond the 1 or 2 minutes arranging things on the plate. Give it a try!

 

I started by making tomato sauce, boiling mezzi rigatoni* (affiliate link here and below), and steaming broccoli. I cut slices of a baguette in half. 

To assemble, I spread hot pasta sauce onto a white plate, then sprinkled a generous amount of parmesan cheese on top. I arranged the rigatoni to make the smily face, added the baguette ears, and topped it off with broccoli hair. Quick, cute, and delicious!

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*I dyed the pasta using a mix of green and brown food dye, because after painting my coral snake,  I wanted to see if it would work to dye a bunch of cooked pasta at the same time. I put some pasta water in a container with a lid, added a little bit of green and brown dye, and shook until it was combined. Then I added the drained pasta and shook again. It came out beautifully colored. 

Dried Pasta Coral Snake

Remember how I said I hadn't shared a single dried pasta craft in 11+ years of blogging? Time to change that! But what to make? When I design crafts, I try to fill gaps. The world doesn't need more tutorials for macaroni necklaces or pasta snowflakes. We don't need another explanation of how to dye pasta. We do need more realistic reptile crafts. So I decided to try to make a banded snake using a different method for coloring pasta than either dip-to-dye or brushing on acrylic paint. 

After a lot of experimentation, I came up with a pasta version of an Eastern Coral Snake. 

 

The first step was picking my pasta. I wanted my snake to have realistic curves, so elbow macaroni was out because the bends are too sharp. My next thought was rigatoni. Maybe I could cook the dried pasta, shape it with a gentle curve, then let it dry that way? We were out of rigatoni, so I used penne. In retrospect, I should have waited for rigatoni. Since penne is cut on the bias, I really struggled with gluing the pieces together without leaving gaps. But I'm getting ahead of myself. 

I boiled a bunch of penne, dried it off (not carefully enough, as it turns out) and put it on parchment paper. Then I dipped a wet paintbrush into food dye and painted the middle third of some penne. I made some black and some red. You can see some of the red ones in the bottom right where the dye ran up the ridges because I hadn't dried it off sufficiently. I gently bent about half of the pieces, hoping that when I left them to dry, they'd retain a gentle bend. Answer: not really. 

I cooked more penne and bent the warm pieces into demitasse cups. I left them to dry, hoping they'd retain the bends. Success!  

I painted the curved pieces with food dye, then used yellow food dye to color the ends. Then I did my best to fit the pieces together, the diagonal edges of the penne fighting me all the way. When I found an arrangement I liked, I glued it to a piece of background paper and added the label. (I'd thought about nestling it in a bed of tomato sauce instead of using glue on paper, because until I added glue, the pasta was edible... if cold and a bit crunchy.) Since making my snake, I've thought of a bunch of things I'd do differently if I made it again. I may or may not do some future experimentation for pasta snakes. 

One more thing I want to share: in researching coral snakes, I came across this interesting article about the famous rhyme. Since I'm not in the habit of touching snakes in the wild and I don't kill snakes, it doesn't really matter to me whether the rhyme holds true 100% of the time. 

More Craft Roundups: Butterflies, Pasta, and Rice

As promised, the next craft roundup I made after the previous batch was butterflies. We have over 100 butterfly craft tutorials at Fun Family Crafts, seven of which are mine. I chose my pretzel monarch butterfly cupcake toppers for the graphic. It's one of three edible crafts I featured, along with two that are wearable, and five that are decorative.

The next roundup I made is Pasta Crafts. None of the featured projects are mine; I've never made a craft from pasta. Well, not never. My mom has a few macaroni treasures from my very young years. But I haven't crafted with pasta since starting the blog. Now that I realized that, I'll be sharing a pasta craft soon.  

Finally, rice crafts for kids. Unlike pasta, I've made a lot of rice crafts... and even more Rice Krispie treat crafts! Five of the featured crafts use plain rice, while the other five are made with Rice Krispies. One of the projects is mine.  

Putting these together is so much fun! Not only do I love making the graphics, but seeing such a wide variety of crafts within a certain topic is very inspiring to me.