Monday, April 11, 2011

tie dyed milk

Ok Im going to start by apolgising for the amount of photos.. this activity really is photo addictive :)


Today began the first official day of the school holidays and I woke up with such an enthusiastic bunch of little people who were just as excited as I was.


I have been collecting ideas and supplies for over a month now... of cool things I'd love to do with this gang of mine. I wrote out the list and put it on the fridge this morning and it was all I could do to stop myself from trying to do it all on the first day!


Now, dont get me wrong, I dont have things planned for every minute of every day. A "friend" ( I'll use that term loosely cos anyone who hassles my parenting style cant really be a friend, can they?!?) told me I over parent my kids and I should let them do whatever they want all day long. But for me, if Ive got something planned that takes up to an hour for each day, then they can spend the rest of the day doing as they please. It means that I feel like Ive done something good by them by having something creative to do. If they dont want to do it, they dont have to. If they want to do more, thats all good too :) Its all about balance, and I know that at the end of the holidays I wont be busting to get them back to school cos we have had fun through the holidays :)


So today, I had an experiment planned. Probably more so because the milk was out of date, but also because its a cool thing to do. Starting with a shallow plate of milk and food colouring, we dropped a few drops of colour into the milk and began to swirl it around.


Now, we have done the experiment using washing liquid as well, this was just simply milk and food colouring. I have seen the most amazing pictures of beautiful swirly colours, worthy of being framed on a wall. Ours? Not so much. The first attempt was pretty dismal...didnt swirl, just made muddy brown milk. maybe because we used lite milk?? And so we tried again... second attempt wasnt much better....



hmm not quite what I wanted...


At this point Amahli was done swirling and went off in search of Jared. Jumeirah and I, not to be defeated on day 1 of holiday fun, persevered with just one more plate of full fat milk. She swirled, and streaked, and zigzagged.. and suddenly the most amazing swirly effect began to happen. Who know how this happened, all I know is we were totally captivated, dropping more colour in, swirling just so, watching beautiful patterns emerge from increasingly darkening milk.



See these swirls? The colours are more seperated, giving a beautiful effect..

Nothing much in this milk activity, just an experience that was a lot of fun and strangely addictive.



And to top off today, we somehow ended up going down to town ( why you'd do that on day 1 of a wet school holiday) and watched in awe as THE REAL JIMMY GIGGLE ( ABC for kids host) walked on stage to sign DVD's! First time my kids have seen someone "famous" in real life. Jumeirahs comment: "Hes actually really real life real!"

Good Day :)

3 comments:

  1. WOW! Those are some frame-able photos of tye died milk right there!I may have to try that sometime. All my food coloring has changed to gel, so I'll have to look around for liquid color. I mean Colour. :)

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  2. We have done the tie dye milk with soap before. It worked really well. We used Dawn liquid dish soap. It works the best. I poured the milk in a pie pan. I had the kids squeeze out the color drops in the center of the milk. We dropped the soap in the center as well. It was fast, but very very cool. I will have to do it again, but as a video. I used low fat milk, it worked fine. I have been told that whole milk works the best, though. I will have to do this again soon and post it this time. You are always so inspirational. :-)

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