Beans, Beans, the Glorious…Art!

We finally did it! We finally dyed some beans! I’ve been pinning ideas for dyed beans for at least a year now and we finally got around to it. Can’t believe I thought it’d be too hard.

So easy! It helps that Bean himself is also old enough now that I know he won’t just eat them.

He LOVED the dying process and thought it was so cool to see the beans go from white to red, green, and yellow.

The colors turned out so beautifully. The process we ended up using was just a splash of white vinegar in a Ziploc bag with about ten drops of food coloring. Shook it up real good, and you could see the color spread through the beans. So cool.

While we let them dry overnight, I started collecting ideas for ways to use them. We’ve since used them for counting, art projects, and sound play.

We made these with just glue and paper plates. We made the first one by grabbing handfuls of the colored beans and dropping them on the glue. Then we tried doing more purposeful placement along glue lines. Bean enjoyed both ways, though I personally love the one that looks like a bunch of flowers because Bean did that one all on his own and I just love his creativity!

Actually, one of the coolest artsy things was a total accident. We lifted the parchment paper to slide the beans into a bin for safekeeping and low and behold, left behind was a beautiful color print that was on both sides!

Later I realized it’d be even prettier if we cut some butterflies out of it for a spring banner and slung it in front of the window to let the sunlight stream through (the picture doesn’t do it justice, of course)! Beautiful!

So, there you have it! Just the start of the many things you can do with colored beans! Who knew?!