This week was our AWANA awards ceremony, where children get trophies for finishing books. One of the trophies contained falling glitter, which Bo was completely fascinated by.
I’ve tried to make her a discovery bottle in the past, and mostly failed, so this time, I did a little more research before starting.
It turns out, oil and water are not enough to suspend anything in water for any length of time. We were unable to find the right combination for larger chunks of glitter (a common problem with these jars), but we did manage to make some pretty cool variations of our own.
Our favorite recipes are below, but first, some general advice if you want to make your own.
- Soap is absolutely critical. If you do not add a few drops of soap to the top of the water, the glitter just sits up there like a floating pile of ants.
- In theory, the more thick material you add, the slower large pieces of glitter would fall, but in our experience, the large pieces just stayed on top of the liquid when it became thick and fell suddenly when it was thinner.
- Mix your ingredients with hot water.
- The basic instruction process is simple: Mix your ingredients together by shaking the jar, then when everything is mixed, add the dish soap.
- If you shake the jar too much, the soap will bubble a lot, so we used a sort of swishing, twirling motion to shake up our jars.
- As the jars cool, the fall time will change, so you can add more thickener if you think you want your glitter to fall slower once the water cools.
- The glue created an atmosphere that was more “space-like,” while the corn syrup created an atmosphere that had more gravitational pull. The fall was slowed, but less of the particles went up like they did in the glue mixture.
Basic Ingredients:
Glitter
Tacky glue
Light Corn Syrup
Glitter glue
Small plastic jars with screw lids
1 Minute Fall Time (pink)
Bo seems to like this jar a lot.
Ingredients:
1 tablespoon corn syrup
6 ox hot water
3-4 drops liquid dish soap (color did not seem to matter)
5 Minute Fall Time (yellow)
This was Monkey’s favorite jar.
Ingredients:
2 tablespoons corn syrup
6 oz hot water
3-4 drops liquid dish soap
10 Minute Fall Time (silver)
Bo liked this jar as well.
Ingredients:
1/4 cup corn syrup
Glitter
6 oz hot water
3-4 drops liquid dish soap
1 Hour Fall Time (blue)
This was my favorite jar, but as a calm down jar, probably not that effective. I put it near a window so the sun could shine through it.
Ingredients:
1/4 bottle glitter glue
Extra glitter
6 oz hot water
3-4 drops liquid dish soap
Once the mixture cools, pour it into a plastic jar and seal the lid with glue. I expect waterproof glue would be best, but I think we used regular Tacky glue, which seems to be holding up all right after a couple of weeks. I used super-glue on our original discovery jars, but it corroded after a few weeks, so I don’t recommend it.
If you experiment with these recipes, let me know! We actually had more fun making the jars than we did playing with them, for the most part. Bo, of course, was only allowed to play with the finished, cooled product.
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| Here she is, stacking like a boss. |
What is your favorite glitter jar recipe?
