Silly Putty or Flubber Science

Since our Borax Bouncy Balls didn't really bounce, I thought I would help the kids make silly putty.  I remember making it once before, and I remember it bouncing when rolled into a ball.  I also remember it picking up images from the newspaper, just like the store bought variety.  Unfortunately, I did that in my pre-blogging days and I have no idea which recipe I used. So, I tried a recipe from The Ultimate Book of Kid Concoctions.

We began by mixing 2 TBSP Elmer's glue with 3 drops food coloring.

Then, we put 1 TBSP liquid starch in a separate cup.  Next, we slowly poured the glue/food coloring mixture on top of the liquid starch and let it stand for five minutes.

The next step is to knead the mixture until it becomes putty.

We tried this twice, but only got slime.  My original thought was that we used too much food coloring, but it didn't make a difference when we used less.  We waited and kneaded and waited and kneaded, but it never solidified.

After some research, I read that some people have better results with white glue rather than school glue.  I'm not sure what the difference is, and I was actually surprised to find a bottle of white glue in our glue stash, so we tried it.

Again, we waited and mixed and waited and mixed, but we never got anything resembling putty that could be kneaded.  It was thicker than the school glue mixture though.  Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr....

Then I came across a recipe for Funny Putty at McCormick (the spice and food coloring people) that called for equal parts of glue and starch (instead of the two parts glue to one part starch recipe we used), so I added more starch to each of the mixtures we still had sitting on the counter.  It didn't quite make silly putty (in the traditional sense), but C and R had a great time playing with it.  I was SO happy to turn this mess into something they could enjoy because they were a bit frustrated and disappointed with the earlier results.

This mixture reminds me of Flubber or the slime in a can you can buy in stores.  I have to warn you, this stuff makes a mess and it was EXTREMELY DIFFICULT to clean up!!!!!!  I won't even post pictures of the mess because they may cause my husband great distress!

There is a recipe for silly putty using Borax.  Maybe we will try that next.  I'll keep you posted.

Have you had success making silly putty?

For more science related posts, check out Science Sunday hosted by Adventures in Mommydom.