Linda Miller Nicholson once constructed kitchen cabinets partially made of pasta for supermodel Gigi Hadid. The cabinets separating the kitchen and living room of Hadid’s Manhattan penthouse in New York are brimming with dried orange and blue farfalle, bird’s nests of red tagliatelle and green garganelli , which you can see through the transparent cabinet doors. To complete the project, Nicholson flew from Seattle to New York with 32kg (70 pounds) of pasta in her suitcase. Nicholson’s Instagram account, @saltyseattle, which has almost 300,000 followers, features images of multicoloured dinosaurs made of pasta, unicorns, roses and even pasta portraits of late United States Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Breonna Taylor, who was killed in a botched police raid in the US state of Kentucky. Nicholson creates these colours by blending coloured plants into the dough. “You name it, and I’ve pasta-ed it,” says Nicholson. “I will pasta anything under the sun.” Premium slow food: artisan-made pasta you’ll want to look out for After forays into fashion design as a teenager and creative writing in college, Nicholson found her artistic medium in pasta, a food with which she’s had a lifelong love affair. With a book, Pasta, Pretty Please: A Vibrant Approach to Handmade Noodles , workshops and various partnerships, Nicholson has also turned pasta art into her career. Nicholson first made pasta when she was four years old. Back then, she lived in rural Idaho but spent a few months each year with her grandparents in California. They helped her roll out her first sheet of pasta with a wine bottle. It was her favourite thing she learned that summer, and Nicholson made pasta at least once a week for the rest of her childhood. As she got older, she worked in restaurants and says she always thought “making a career out of food would be amazing”, but was turned off by the rough working conditions. Instagram cooks on the cookbooks their social media posts spawned At the same time, she became interested in art. “I always thought I was an artist,” Nicholson says. “I don’t think anyone else did.” As a teenager, she designed and made her own clothes. Nicholson wanted to go to college for fashion design, but her parents didn’t support her decision. She wound up getting a creative writing degree with the plan of becoming a teacher. Nicholson got her master’s in education remotely while living in the Piedmont region of Italy with her boyfriend at the time. But while she was student-teaching there, she realised she hated the constraints of curriculum and didn’t want to be a teacher. In her free time, she obsessed over local pasta shapes and learned about pasta making from anybody who’d teach her. When Nicholson moved back to the US, she dabbled in freelance journalism and flipped a few houses in the Seattle area. Her friend Patrick Stephens, who lived down the block from one of these houses, recalls Nicholson hosting dinner parties where she’d make pasta from scratch for a dozen people. She had a son during the same time, Bentley Danger Nicholson, who like many kids, went through a picky phase. His favourite food was pasta. To get him to eat vegetables, she started blending them into the pasta dough. After some experimenting, she was halfway to a rainbow. She decided to take it all the way and started posting pictures of pasta of every colour of the rainbow on social media. Eventually, she caught the attention of Cassie Jones Morgan, an editor at US publishing company HarperCollins. She told Nicholson: “You have to turn this idea into a book. If you don’t do this, somebody else will.” Nicholson was filled with self-doubt at first, but signed the book deal in 2016, and it was published two years later. As she worked on the book, she posted pictures of her projects on social media . Her Instagram blew up. And at the same time, she realised she’d had an artistic medium all along. Nicholson was a pasta artist. Since the book came out, Nicholson has become a minor celebrity. There are articles about her in dozens of national publications like People and Saveur . She leads corporate team building workshops for large companies like Microsoft. And she’s the current artist-in-residence for the Italian food chain Eataly. If people can’t handle the rainbow, then I don’t need them in my life Linda Miller Nicholson At Nicholson’s studio one December morning – a converted garage with counters and shelves filled with pasta equipment – she finishes kneading the orange ball of pasta dough and lays it next to others covered in cling film: red, purple, blue, green and yellow. She’s wearing blue, flared jeans with a rainbow arched across the back. Her grey T-shirt has a rainbow on the front. There are even rainbows on the heels of her black slippers. “I’ve always been really drawn to colour,” Nicholson says. “I’m also very pro- LGBT rights.” Though the rainbow pasta and clothes match Nicholson’s personality, she says she also uses them to signal her values. “If people can’t handle the rainbow, then I don’t need them in my life.”