Making Slime

I absolutely love Pinterest and have found so many cool things and ideas on that site. I was browsing it this morning and saw a link on how to make slime and thought what a great thing to try with Andrew once he got out of school!

One thing I wasn't crazy about with the link was that the recipe was at the bottom, so I'm going to give it to you up front (if you decide not to look at our pics, it's your loss ;).

We learned a few lessons from mistakes, and those are included at the end.

Homemade Slime aka GAK

1 teaspoon borax powder

1 1/2 C water, divided

4 oz (1/2 C)  Elmer’s glue, clear or white

food coloring

Add borax powder to 1 cup of water and stir to dissolve.  Set aside.  Pour glue into a medium mixing bowl and add 1/2 C water. Add a few drops of food coloring until desired color is reached and then stir to mix glue solution until smooth.  Pour the borax mixture into the glue mixture and watch the solids start to form.  Stir for a few moments and then use your hands to gather the mass.  The mixture will be very soft and wet.  Keep kneading until it firms up and feels dry.  Discard excess liquid in bowl. The more you knead and play with the slime the firmer it will become.  Store in a ziplock bag or air tight container and the slime will keep indefinitely.

patiently waiting for mom to get the camera ready

ingredients (plus water which isn't shown)

take a cup of water

add a teaspoon of borax and mix until it dissolves

in a separate bowl add 4oz of glue (you can use clear or white)

add half a cup of water

and food coloring

mix until smooth

add in the borax solution

if you did everything right, you'll immediately see the solid matter starting to collect

he actually wanted in a picture!

using your hands, gather all the goopy, icky slime and start kneading it 

(he is literally saying "eeeewwww!")

it is pretty nasty!

remove all the goop from the water

and keep kneading it until it dries up some and doesn't stick so badly to your hands

once you have it out, you can toss the leftover water

so stretchy!

definitely a fun and quick activity to do with your child!

What we learned:

1. Read carefully - I had read online that 4oz is 1/4 cup and proceeded to use that measurement for our glue. Truth is, the bottle of glue is 4oz. We didn't discover that until after making our first batch which didn't work.

2. Have extra glue on hand - Just in case you mess up.

3. Do NOT use the gel food colors - for the first try we put the gel right in and it didn't "take" at all combined with the extra water to glue ratio. Once I realized where we went wrong I halved the water and also mixed the food coloring in water separately to create a liquid food coloring. The color wasn't nearly as bright, but did work somewhat.

4. Have paper towels near by, it's messy, but worth it!