TBT: Color in a Bag, Plus More Color Mixing Fun!

For today's Throw Back Thursday post, we redid an activity that we've enjoyed before so that Sharli could get in on the fun too. This Color in a Bag activity is so much fun!

 It's been so long since we did this one that it was like a new activity for Erik. He loved it!

 I did have to watch Sharli carefully so that she didn't chew holes in the bags, but other than that this was a pretty low-stress activity.

 To add on to this one, we also added in some color mixing bottles. We found this idea on the same list of activities as our Carrot on a String activity. I've wished for a while now I could find some way to make a color mixing toy that would settle back into two distinct colors for long term play, so I was excited to try this idea out.

I was planning on making three of these bottles (yellow+red, red+blue, blue+yellow) but when it came time to put these together I couldn't find the other empty bottle I'd saved for this. Maybe we'll end up making the last bottle eventually, and if we do I'll be sure to share it with you all.

So, what do you need to make these babies? Let's gather our supplies:

- empty bottles with lids

-baby oil

-crayons (the original site calls for candle wax coloring, but crayons worked fine for us)

-water

-food coloring

-hot glue gun and glue

A few days before you want to assemble these, cut up the crayons (I used yellow crayons, it took 3-4 for one bottle of baby oil) into tiny shavings and put them in the bottle of baby oil. Let this sit for a few days until the crayons have mostly dissolved. 

When you're ready to assemble your bottles, fill them half full with water, colored with food coloring. Add your colored oil until the bottle is full, then seal the lid with the hot glue. You may want to shake up the bottle once before sealing it to make sure you didn't get too much of one color or the other. 

 When you shake the bottle, the colors mix together and you can see the bubbles of oil swirling in the water, almost like a lava lamp. They're really pretty! We found that the blue+yellow combo worked better, the red in the red+yellow bottle bled into the yellow oil a bit and so after a few shakes, the bottle just stayed orange. It was still really pretty though!