I-Spy Bottle with Beautiful Rainbow Rice

Yesterday I hosted a craft playdate with the Honolulu Mommies. What a great group of gals! We had about 10 kiddos come and we made some I-Spy bottles! 

Prior to the playdate I made some rainbow rice:

The process is simple and only takes a few minutes! I'll tell you how at the bottom of this post!

Here are the bottles of prepped rice. Aren't the colors beautiful?  It would've been easier to have mixed the colors at home but I thought the kids might like to see all the different colors:

Here is the rice all mixed up. (Thanks to my hand model, Michelle!)

Everyone was asked to bring trinkets to share. We had pom-poms, buttons, pennies, BBs, stickers, marbles, bells, ribbon, foam cut-outs, pieces of felt, crayons, paper clips, alphabet beads, etc. etc.! After we got home we found some other things to add such as sea glass, shells, Lego pieces, erasers tops, and pieces of straw. I'm sure we'll find more things to add!

Funnels worked great to pour the rice into the bottles. However, paper funnels (roll the papers into a tube and tape) worked just as well!

And here are two of the completed bottles:

While I would have preferred that each bottle have only one of each trinket the kiddos seemed to really enjoy stuffing their bottles with whatever they could get hands on! They couldn't even wait for the stickers to be individually cut. Oh well!

Now....how to make the rainbow rice!

ll you need is rice, food coloring, rubbing alcohol, a baggie to mix the rice in, wax paper and some table space to let the color dry/set.

Obviously you can increase or decrease the amount of rice you are going to use but this is how I did it:

For each color:

• 
  
  pour 1 and 1/2 cups of rice into a baggie
• 
  
  add 1/2 tsp of rubbing alcohol
• 
  
  add a few squirts of food coloring
• 
  
  seal the bag and shake it up
• 
  
  when you have the desired color pour the rice out onto a flat surface covered with wax paper
• 
  
  let the rice dry - it only takes about 15 minutes!
• 
  
  repeat for each of the other colors

That's it!

To make the I-Spy bottle pour the rice into your bottle. For a 16.9 oz. bottle you need about 1 and 1/2 cups of rice. Don't fill the rice to the top or else you won't have room for your trinkets! Add your trinkets, seal it (I recommend using super glue or a hot glue gun to hold the seal) and shake it up!

Just an FYI - we were expecting about 10 kids to attend the playdate. Worried that others may show up unexpectedly or bottles of rice were going to spill I prepped 16 bottles and it was more than enough. A few of the kids happily ended up making more than one bottle! :)

*Thanks to Pink and Green Mama (one of my new favorite blogs for crafts!) for the inspiration and instructions on making rainbow rice! Only later did I notice that she also made I-Spy bottles with her rainbow rice! She had some GREAT trinkets. Go check her out!