Bubbles You Can Touch!
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Bubbles bubbles bubbles! I love those iridescent colors and how each one is different. They are definitely on the list of things I would love to preserve if I could. Bubbles are something we enjoy all year long. Even in winter we will go out when it’s super cold to blow bubbles and watch them freeze. Part of the fun of bubbles is popping them, but this time we decided to try to make some that were a little more durable. By that I mean bubbles that we could actually hold and play with a little bit. My boys were totally on board, so we managed to get some bubble time in today before a storm rolled in. I don’t think I’d ever made my own bubble solution, so even that was new to me.
Here’s the bubble recipe we used:
2 cups of water
1/4 cup dish soap (we used blue Dawn)
2 tablespoons glycerin
I got the recipe HERE.
I’ve seen bubble recipes that call for distilled water, but we didn’t have any, so we used regular tap water. We don’t have particularly soft water, but we got some good bubbles out of it.
Some people apparently prefer to use clear dish soap, but we got beautiful bubbles from the blue Dawn. I can’t imagine how bubbles would look different with clear soap.
Glycerin is what makes the bubbles last longer. You can find a small bottle in the baking section of craft stores, but I thought the bottle I bought on Amazon was a good deal. We have enough left over to make a lot more batches of bubbles.
Here’s what I bought and used.
I’ve since found another good option though.
Here’s that one.
Other supplies you need are something to blow bubbles with and special cotton gloves. We tried a couple of different bubble-blowing instruments. We have a lot of bottles of bubble solution around the house, so we took a bubble wand from one of those and rinsed it off. The link I posted above suggested a disposable pipette, and I happened to have some of those on hand. If you want to buy some, there are a lot of options on Amazon. Here are some options I found, depending on how many you want.
300 I know, I know… but it’s a really good deal, and who knows when you might need pipettes. The ones I’m using actually came with some resin molds, so you just never know.
The gloves are super soft and make it possible to touch and hold the bubbles. I ordered this pack from Amazon, which gave us more than enough.
I figure they will also work well this winter when I’m trying to pamper my poor dry, cracked hands with heavy duty lotion.
To make the bubble solution, first we poured the water into a bowl. Then we poured the Dawn into the bowl and slowly mixed it in. We were careful not to mix it too quickly or we would’ve ended up with a bowl full of bubbles before we were ready to blow bubbles. We poured the glycerin in last and slowly mixed that in as well. That’s it! Now it’s bubble time! Note: I found a lot of bubble recipes that said to let the solution sit overnight or 24 hours or whatever, but we used ours right away.
This is where we had fun experimenting. Each of us wore at least one glove so that we could touch the bubbles. The boys took turns with the bubble wand and pipette (after I proved that my skills with the pipette left a lot to be desired). Both worked pretty well. Similar to blowing regular bubbles, I would say. I had some trouble getting the bubbles to release from the pipette, but the boys did well with it.
The bubbles are not indestructible, but they do last longer than regular bubbles. Some popped immediately, but others we were able to play with. I tried touching one of them with my bare hand, and it popped immediately. We were indeed able to “catch” them with the gloves though, and we were able to toss them from one gloved hand to another.
That was very cool. We even managed to poke them, and they were able to withstand a little bit of that before they popped. I heard a lot of “You popped my bubble!” while I was trying to get a video of this, and I never did. But I did get a picture…
Here’s a video of what I was able to capture.
Even bubbles that flew away were highly entertaining. We watched one in particular fly really really far away. I don’t even think it popped before it disappeared from view.
Next time I’d like to try this on a day when there isn’t a storm moving in. It was just windy enough that by the end we were losing more bubbles than I think we would have otherwise. Fortunately I was able to save the leftover bubble solution by pouring it into an empty Gatorade container (hey, it’s what I had handy!), so we can try again soon.
