Thinking up new craft ideas for the summer, we figured creating some homemade slime would be pretty cool. The kids have never made homemade slime before and were excited to try it. There was only one issue: borax. we don’t know about you, but the only time we ever need borax is when it comes time to create slime. Borax comes in huge qualities, meaning that you’d need to make a lot of slime or store it for ages. We am not a fan of borax and do not use it for washing clothes or anything. So we started doing what any other person on the internet does; Googling for recipes that do not need borax.
It turns out, you can make slime with eye solution! After running out to the shops and picking up eye solution at Tesco’s, some glue , some bicarbonate of soda and food colouring, we figured everything was ready. When the kids came over, we dished out some bowl, divided up the glue and added everything together, allowing them to mix. After quite a bit of mixing, it became clear that instead of slime we’d created some sort of slightly sandy mixture of paint. Confused, we turned back to looking up what went wrong. The blogs we have read are actually US based, where they put – you guessed it! – borax in our eye solution. In the United Kingdom, the eye solution we purchased does not have borax in it, therefore the slime did not work.
Determined to actually find some way to make slime without purchasing borax, we found a kit of three glitter glues perfect for slime (they came with spoons) and the solution sold by Sugru by tesa company that can be used to create slime. A little suspicious of how well this slime would come out, we took the risk – with next day delivery we figured Amazon would be my rescue. Everything did arrive, which was great, and we got on with making our glitter slime the next day.
This mix of glue and solution actually worked really well. The solution bottle makes three slimes, so having all three bottles of glue made sense. It was very easy to measure out the solution and add it to the glue, letting the kids stir and mix them together. On the first day, the slime was a bit more sticky/oil-y feeling then the homemade version previously felt to me, but the kids didn’t seem to mind and really enjoyed getting this stuff everywhere. Slime on their jeans, on the rug, on the couch – all which came out really easily, thankfully.
A few weeks later, the older two still have (slightly dirty) but fun slimes to play around with. They are far less sticky now and seem more like giant stretchy rubber things. We stored ours in zip closing bags out of direct sunlight (as one was left in sunlight for a little bit and got very oil-y.) Making slimes is a pretty fun activity and if you don’t use borax, it’s great that there are solution kits available.
We hope everyone is staying safe and keeping entertained.