1.16.2012

Homemade Bouncy Ball


Since today was a school holiday, Garrett was at my house and I wanted to do something fun with him. I was pretty excited to try out this homemade bouncy ball. I ended up being very disappointed with it. I looked at many different e-how pages about doing this, but couldn't find any comments of anyone that had actually tried it. There were a couple of different "recipes" that I tried, but wasn't satisfied with either one.

Ingredients: 

  • 1/2 tsp. borax
  • 2 tbsp. water
  • 1 tbsp. Elmer's glue
  • 1 tbsp. cornstarch
  • food coloring (optional)
 You'll need 2 separate cups to mix your ingredients. Labeling them is completely unnecessary, but I like being pointless.

  1. In the first cup mix the borax and the water together. 
  2. In the other cup put your glue. Mix in your food coloring until the glue is your desired color.



  3. Pour your borax mixture on top of the glue, but DO NOT MIX yet.
    This is where I found some inconsistencies. Some places say to use 1/2 tsp of the borax mixture and some say to use it all. I didn't have good luck with either way, but preferred only using 1/2 tsp of it.
  4. Add the cornstarch. STILL NOT MIXING.



  5. Wait 15 seconds.
  6. Mix until it forms a blob and won't mix anymore.




  7. Take out and knead in your hands. Form it into a ball as it gets more solid.
    It will be sticky at first, but that quickly goes away.


I'm not sure how long it's supposed to take until it's considered a ball. I kneaded the first one (the yellowish one) I made for a LONG time, and it never seemed to be good enough. It got to the point that I was just playing with it like silly putty and then it started drying out before I could form it into a good ball. 


The second one (the blue one) I kneaded for a little while and it wouldn't really hold its form or bounce, so I gave up on it.








These are supposed to last for a couple of days when stored in a plastic bag. I obviously wasn't worried about them, so you can see that they'd already started drying out by the time I took pictures.



I don't know if I'll try this again. It was really easy to do, but it was pretty frustrating since neither attempt worked out. They didn't bounce much at all, and the second one was really hard to try to roll in a ball at all.
I hope if you try it you have better luck than me. :)


Here's the original pin:
Source: eHow via Victoria on Pinterest
And am I the only one who thinks it's completely deceiving that all these eHow tutorials use pictures of REAL bouncy balls? The homemade ones don't look ANYTHING like that. 



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