Slime!

I've seen various slime ideas on the internet, they all seem slightly different, but in the end this one worked quite nicely for us.

1 cup Water

half a cup White glue

1 tsp Borax

few drops Food colouring.

Borax is not necessarily terribly easy to buy in the UK, but I ordered it from Amazon and it turned up a couple of days later.

Dissolve the borax in the water.  In a separate bowl, add the food colouring to the glue.  Mix the two together, they will immediately begin to polymerise. Give it a good stir in the bowl with a wooden spoon, (do NOT whisk!) but as soon as the glue seems less sticky, you can start to pull it out with your hands.  There will be excess water left behind, don't worry about it.  Then play with it and mould it until it starts to come together.  

Water, borax and coloured glue.

Getting ready to stir!

Pulling the slime out!

And onto the table for Mixing.

Playing!

I did this on a day when we had friends round - it's a nice activity, they were thrilled to do it and I heard more from my friend's daughter about it than I ever have before!

A couple of points about the mixture - I just used white glue bought from Amazon, but you can use clear glue to get brighter colours and apparently the quality of the glue is important.  I found that using more borax in the mix resulted in a harder slime, and less in a sticky, runnier slime.  Regardless of how running (or not) it seemed, if you put it down on a surface, it escaped!  As we found when The Eldest put hers down on a bookshelf and I had to spend 20 minutes removing it from books.  We stored it in ziplock bags in the end so it couldn't run away. I was also surprised by how well the colour stayed in the slime - I was expecting it to end up all over the place like it does from play dough, but actually it seemed pretty sealed in.