Guck

We had to try another project from tottreatsures.blogspot.com before we denounced her as a fraud (it's much easier to denounce her than to denounce myself as an inept crafter) - we went for GAK. Another project with only two ingredients, one of which is glue - how could this possibly go wrong? Again?

If you're waiting for a funny story about how my project went woefully wrong and my Awesome Mom-ness turned out worse than an idea by Tim the Toolman Taylor himself, weeeeell forget it. I WON this project!

First, I picked the color - blue! No pumpkin guts here! Second, her directions were a little more specific, and I made sure to follow them closely and in the same order as she did them. Third, it was a less expensive project so I liked it better already. It required one bottle of regular glue, which retails for $0.34, plus a teaspoon of Borax, which I already had on hand; slime required 2 (and actually 3, after I did the math, but I only bought 2) bottles of clear glue, which cost $1.77 each, plus a bottle of starch, which is $3.50. If stopping Armageddon required me to iron a shirt, it might happen - if that shirt required starching, we'd all be dead. Clearly, liquid starch is only for crafting at my house., so now I am FORCED to attempt slime again at some point just to get rid of it. 

So with those three positives on my side, we spent a very nice hour playing with GAK! Actually, my kids called it "guck," which works too.

The worst part of the experience was that orange serrated "knife" you see in three of those pictures - if Gak was gold, that knife was diamond-encrusted platinum. It's a tool from a kids pumpkin carving kit, so it's not sharp, but it IS popular and I only have one. Looks like this Awesome Mom needs to do a little shopping come Halloween time. The second-worst part was that each Gak recipe only makes a very small amount. I was in no way sure that this project would work right off the bat so I didn't double the recipe or anything, and each kid only ended up with a teeny-tiny amount. Luckily, they're kids, so they come with teeny tiny hands, and it wasn't the end of the world and nobody complained they wanted more (unlike their favorite playdoh from http://musingsfromasahm.com/2012/02/easy-homemade-playdough-recipe, which they constantly demand more of).

In the end, I highly recommend Gak (from http://tottreasuresnorthbay.blogspot.com/2012/01/gak.html) because it's a) easy, b) cheap, and c) it lasts - I bagged it up when we were done and we played with it again today! No rubber balls here!

That's it here, Awesome Mom OUT.