Linda Miller Nicholson once built kitchen cabinets partially made of pasta for model Gigi Hadid.

The cabinets separating the kitchen and living room of Hadid’s Manhattan penthouse are overflowing with orange and blue dried farfalle, red tagliatelle bird’s nests and green garganelle, which you can see through the transparent cabinet doors. To complete the project, Nicholson flew from Seattle to New York with 70 pounds of pasta in her suitcase.

Nicholson’s Instagram account, @saltyseattle, which has nearly 300,000 followers, features images of multicolored dinosaurs made of pasta, unicorns made of pasta, roses made of pasta and even pasta portraits of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Breonna Taylor. Nicholson creates these colors by mixing brightly colored plants into the paste.

“You name it, and I made it with pasta,” Nicholson said as he kneaded a ball of orange pasta dough at his studio in Fall City east of Seattle… anything under the sun.”

After forays into fashion design as a teenager and creative writing in college, Nicholson found her artistic medium in pasta, a food she’s had a lifelong love affair with. With a book, “Pasta, Pretty Please: A Vibrant Approach to Handmade Noodles,” in-person and online workshops, and various brand partnerships, Nicholson has also made pasta art her career.

Nicholson first made pasta when she was 4 years old. At the time, she lived in rural Idaho but spent a few months each year with her grandparents in California.

That’s where her grandparents helped her roll out her first sheet of pasta with a bottle of wine (they didn’t have a sheeter or rolling pin). It was her favorite 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 “a career in food would be amazing”, but was discouraged by the harsh working conditions. At the same time, she is interested in art.

“I always thought I was an artist,” Nicholson said. “I don’t think anyone else did.”

As a teenager, she designed and sewed her own clothes. Nicholson wanted to go to college for fashion design, but her parents weren’t supportive of her decision. She ended up earning a degree in creative writing with the goal of becoming a teacher.

Nicholson earned her master’s degree in distance education while living in the Piedmont region of Italy with her boyfriend at the time. But while she was a student teacher there, she realized that she hated the constraints of the curriculum and didn’t want to be a teacher. In her spare time, she was obsessed with local pasta shapes and learned pasta making from anyone who taught her.

When Nicholson returned to the United States, she took up freelance journalism and knocked down a few houses in the Seattle area. Her friend Patrick Stephens, who lived a stone’s throw from one, remembers Nicholson hosting dinner parties where she made pasta from scratch for a dozen people.

She had a son around the same time, Bentley Danger Nicholson, who like many children went through a rough patch. Her favorite dish was pasta.

To get him to eat vegetables, she started mixing them into the pasta dough. After a few experiments, she was halfway to a rainbow. She decided to go all the way and started posting pictures of pasta in all the colors of the rainbow on social media.

Eventually, she caught the eye of Cassie Jones Morgan, editor at HarperCollins. She told Nicholson, “You have to turn this idea into a book. If you don’t, someone else will.

Nicholson was full of doubt. She had never worked as a chef and was mostly self-taught. She was also disappointed with her artistic development.

“I always lamented that I didn’t have a medium that I was really good at,” she said.

But after a while, Nicholson realized she really was an expert. She had been making pasta since she was 4 years old and she had been an artist for years. Nicholson signed the book deal in 2016, and it was published two years later.

While working on the book, she posted photos of her projects on social media. Her Instagram exploded. And at the same time, she realized that she had always had an artistic medium. Nicholson was a pasta artist.

“I realized, ‘oh my God, I have artistic dexterity, it’s just not something that involves holding a pen and paper or a brush.’

Since the book’s release, Nicholson has become a minor celebrity. There are articles about him in dozens of national publications like People and Saveur. She leads enterprise team building workshops for large companies like Microsoft. And she’s currently artist-in-residence for Italian food chain Eataly.

In Nicholson’s workshop in Fall City one December morning – a converted garage with counters and shelves filled with pasta material – Nicholson finishes kneading the orange ball of pasta dough and lays it next to others covered plastic wrap: red, purple, blue, green and yellow.

She wears flared blue jeans with an arched rainbow on the back. His gray T-shirt has a rainbow on the front. There are even rainbows on the heels of her black slippers.

“I’ve always been very drawn to color,” Nicholson said. “I’m also very pro-LGBTQIA for rights.”

Nicholson’s family was close to many gay people during his childhood. His mother also wrote a thesis on HIV during the AIDS epidemic when Nicholson was 6 years old. She says she drew parallels between the persecution of gay men during this time and the racism her multiracial family endured while living in rural Idaho (her mother is black and her father is white). So while much of his pasta art is purely fun, it is also sometimes political.

In the caption of her August 2020 Breonna Taylor Instagram portrait post, she wrote, “Arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor.” And much of his pasta art is filled with LGBTQ+ pride symbols.

At the studio, Nicholson makes a rainbow pinwheel of tortellini. She says her favorite hashtag is #pride365, which means supporting the LGBTQ+ community shouldn’t be limited to Pride Month (June).

To make the pinwheel, Nicholson runs the rainbow-colored balls of dough through the pasta machine into sheets and cuts the sheets into squares. She places a spoonful of filling (ricotta and Parmigiano-Reggiano) on each square, then folds them into tortellini that follow one another, finally forming a solid wheel.

Although the rainbow pasta and clothes fit 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.”

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