Maker Mondays - Lava Lamps & Pet Jellyfish

This month's Maker Monday program was a combination of crafts and science as we did two hands-on projects, both involving plastic bottles and colored water.

The first project, and probably the easiest of the two, was the lava lamps.  I got the basic idea for this idea from a project I saw on Pinterest (check it out!) and many similar projects with tutorials can also be found online.  The basic idea is to fill a bottle half with water (colored with a few drops of food coloring) and half with vegetable oil (baby oil also works and is clear in color, but is more expensive).  The oil and the water will not mix no matter how much you try to stir/shake the two together because of their differing densities.  To make the lava lamps work best, I recommend filling your bottles with water first and then topping them off with oil.  If you do it the other way around, you'll need to give the bottles more time for the liquids to sort themselves out before moving on to the next step or the effect will not be very exciting.

Extra bling like glitter and sequins could be added at this point to give the lamps a bit of pizazz.  Once the bottles are prepped, the real magic begins.  Simply break an alka-seltzer tablet into pieces.  Drop a piece of the tablet into the bottle and watch the colored water bubble up through the oil.  Neat!  Our testing showed that with a one-liter bottle you could put up to half of a tablet into the bottle at once, though any more than that was overkill.

The second project was a little more involved, but the finished product was totally worth the effort.  We made jellyfish in a bottle!  Instructions for this project can be found here, but I do have a few tips for anyone who might want to give this project a try. 

• When you're cutting the plastic bag to give your jellyfish legs/tentacles, remember that you're cutting off and throwing away A LOT more plastic than you're keeping.  You really only need 15-20 super-skinny tentacles.
• Related to that:  Be sure that your tentacles are skinny, skinny, skinny!  If you're looking at your tentacles and think that you could cut them in half pretty easily, then you probably should.
• Instead of using a string to tied your jellyfish's head, we used tiny rubber bands used for hair braiding.  Seemed much easier to use and provided the needed stretch.

The finished product was super cool.  I put one of these jellyfish out as a sample, and tons of people stopped to play with it.  It helped to drum up lots of interest in the program!  I tried for ages to get a good picture, but my timing wasn't very good.  Enjoy this video instead.

I had eight participants in this program, four teens and four tweens, and they all seemed to enjoy themselves.  Part of me wishes that I would have had an assistant to help them with their projects since everyone, especially the tweens, needed a little guidance and/or reassurance that they were doing everything correctly.  But we made do, and everyone's projects turned out really well. 

The cost of this program was pretty minimal since most of the materials were easily upcycled.  Both projects required empty plastic bottles.  Fortunately, I have a friend with a crazy soda addiction who buys his soda in one-liter bottles.  He saved tons and tons of bottles for me to use for this program.  We had food coloring left over from another project, and plastic shopping bags were easy to come by.  A staff member with daughters who were totally over the hair braiding phase donated tiny rubber bands to use for the jellyfish.  The only supplies that I had to purchase was the vegetable oil and alka-seltzer for the lava lamps.