Silly Putty in Pictures

We made silly putty today.  As you'll see, it's very lucky that the homemade kind is water soluble.

First the boys had to mix the glue and water.  I warned them to mix carefully and I swear in the first 30 seconds Grady slopped a bunch all over the table.  Then he said "I think I didn't mix carefully enough".  It wipes up pretty easily and Grady did a good job mixing after that.

Next we added food coloring.  Peter had a hard time picking what color he wanted.  First green, but then Grady said green too.  Then Grady picked yellow and Peter thought about yellow.  Finally he decided on red.  For the amount of food coloring we used, he only got pink, but he seemed to be rather happy with it.  He made all kinds of comments like "eww, it looks like a brain" and stuff like that.

After that came the borax and water mixture.  There was lots of hand mixing that had to happen after that.  Lots of "ewww" and "this feels gross" and stuff, but they were having a great time with it.

Once everything was all mixed together, the fun began.  First it was just squishing and making noises.  Then it turned into letting it ooze around on the table and "cutting" it with cookie cutters.  Whipping with it was quickly overruled by me as pieces started flying all over the room.

There was a lot of throwing and almost bouncing, but I had to make sure they kept it confined to the wood floor, not the carpet.

Then the inevitable happened - Peter put it on his head as a hat and it stuck to his hair.

He sat trying to pick it out of his hair.  It's all such an odd consistency.  It sticks really solidly but if you can get it just right, it slides right off things.  I had to help get the big chunk out of his hair and just left some stray bits to come off in the shower later.

At some point, Peter got a huge blog and threw it at the ground and started pretending it was some guy he was fighting.  Squishing him up into tiny pieces all over the floor.  At the end, the victory statement of "he's dead".

We were able to collect all the pieces and save both blobs to play with another day.  We'll see how long the stuff lasts.  It's in the fridge for now.

Later, Grady and Peter showed me an uh-oh spot on the carpet where there was a large chunk of the stuff.  Luckily with some soapy water it all came off without a problem.  I see many fun times in the near future of finding interesting things to do with this stuff.