Day 106: Chalk

It was a dark and dreary day today and I knew there was no hope in getting the girls outside to play, so I decided that today would be an exceptionally nice day to make sidewalk chalk.  I had a few reservations, mainly that I didn't have powdered tempura paint, but I found a blog that said you could use acrylic paint (more on that later) or food coloring.  So, I finally decided to bite the bullet and sit down with the girls to make chalk.

There is prep work and forethought that must go into this.  You need silicon molds (silicon cupcake holders work well) or toilet paper/paper towel tubes.  If you use cardboard tubes, you have to seal the bottom so that chalk doesn't leak out while it is still runny.  Well, I was being lazy the first time and didn't want to go find the duct tape, so I grabbed packaging tape from beside me and sealed the bottoms.  BIG mistake, it POURED out of the the packaging tape like a breached levy!  So, i stopped immediately, and replaced all the tape with duct tape.. until I ran out of duct tape, and covered the remaining tubes with large pieces of masking tape.  Lesson learned: (which surprised me honestly) masking tape is the way to go!

First and foremost- not for the faint of heart.  Chalk making is MESSY.  There was plaster of paris everywhere in the dining room!  It is just a powder, so as you're pouring it, dust is flying everywhere, ugh, what a mess.  But, I mixed it: 1 cup PoP and 3/4 cup water, and then split it between the girls in small Glad plastic bowls.  I gave them each a wooden Popsicle stick to let them mix their colors with.  We started with using acrylic paint for the dye, but there are 2 problems with that.  First, if it isn't super runny, it just clumps up in the PoP mixture and doesn't actually dye anything.. Second, you have to use a LOT of even the runny kind to dye the PoP, and it turned gloopy really fast and is taking a much longer time than the others to dry.  I will say this though, it is the prettiest, brightest chalk we have!  We used food coloring for the rest, and they turned out really nice, especially the Neon colors.

The blog I got the recipe out of said that hers took THREE days to dry enough to use, so I thought "ok, it is going to take about 3 days before it is nice enough to go out and play with the weather predictions right now."  Well, as you can CLEARLY see, it did not take three days to dry, it didn't even take three hours.  I think they were ready to come out of the molds within an hour.  Then, i let them dry a few more hours and rubbed the remnants of the cardboard tubes off the things of chalk.  Now I am just waiting to have a nice day to take the girls out to use their chalks.

Thankfully, clean up was not difficult with this and most everything ended up being trash.... which could be a problem since our trash men are on strike :/

Day 5-Splat

It was bound to happen, I knew the day would come.  My only hope was, it wouldn't day be on the fifth day of this year long quest... We had a dud.  A big, slimy, sticky, purple, dud.  My aunt, uncle, and cousin were due in around noon, so after hurrying up and cleaning the house, I decided to get our "art" out of the way today.  I wanted to do something that didn't involve sitting around the table (the owl project yesterday has me tired of sitting in my seat at the table).  So, I started searching, and I found this really neat "slime" idea.  http://www.ourbestbites.com/2010/09/kids-in-the-kitchen-slime/
Huh, Slime, new, different, get the kids involved, let them mix, pour, and create, and it is something I can pull out on quiet days.  Or so I thought.  I got my water, I emptied our glue bottle- we had EXACTLY 1/2 cup left- I went downstairs and pulled the Borax out of the laundry room.  I was SET.  So, I measured everything out, called the kids in, and we started adding.  I was encouraged, it looked like the pictures.  The girls wanted purple, so I set to work making purple with blue and red food coloring.  Heck, it even turned PURPLE!  This was looking good!

And then, we got to the "You might think you messed up because it's so loose.  Just keep smooshing!" step. Oh, what a mess!  We smooshed, and we smooshed, we stirred, kneaded, smooshed some more.  And eventually, when I finally thought my arm would fall off from smooshing so much, it formed a ball!  Ahh, sweet relief!  Great, we have our "art" done, now we can play with it for awhile.  I put the ball back in the bowl for about 5 seconds, turn around to get a paper towel, look back, and it is liquid once again!  UGH!  So, by this point, my family is here.  My cousin starting trying to help me "doctor" this substance that is looking more and more like the You Can't Do That On Television slime by the minute, just purple.  No matter what we do, it is just liquid as soon as you stop kneading it.  So, I am left with a bag full of purple slime that will likely never see the light of day, a bowl that may be permanently crusted with a glue, borax, purple food color mix, and purple... all... over... the.... kitchen.  If I thought that mixing this stuff was hard, yeah, the scrubbing of the kitchen that came after was FAR worse.

Chalk one up to learning, I will NEVER make "slime" again.  But, the kids had a BLAST squishing it between their fingers, and getting to help make it, so I guess, all in all, it wasn't a total failure...   But, I think you can understand why I am NOT posting the recipe here....