How to make slime

When someone suggested I make slime with my seven-year-old daughter three reasons not to make slime with my daughter immediately leapt to mind.

• It will be really messy
• I’ll mess it up and my daughter will forever see me as the dad who couldn’t make slime
• Who wants slime anyway?

In fact, making slime was easy, loads of fun, and the end results were really quite impressive. Most of all, for reasons perhaps even they don’t understand, kids love the stuff. So without further ado, and just in time for Halloween, here’s how to make slime, featuring slime queen Poppy.

Time needed: 15 minutes.

Step 1 – Get the right ingredients

You’ll need glue – the white, pouring stuff that kids use at school (PVA), and something else. Our ‘something else’ was Almat Non Bio super concentrated washing liquid, available from Aldi. Other people recommend different products (Formil from Lidl, content lens solution, etc – all of which contain boric acid in some form) but this is the one that worked best for us. Don’t ask me about the chemistry involved, but something in the detergent takes the stickiness out of the glue and makes it all rubbery and fun. That’s it. It’s the ingredient of fun.

And that’s it for essentials. You can add food colouring, sparkly things and so on as a way to make your slime more interesting, but it’s up to you.

Step 2 – Measure

Measure 250ml of the glue and pour it into a bowl. Add one tablespoon of ‘fun’ (Almat).

Step 3 – Combine for a few minutes

Use a spoon to combine the ingredients and stir to mix for a few minutes. The mixture will start to thicken and clag but persevere until the mixture starts to come away from the edges of the bowl.

Step 4 – Get messy with your hands!

Now it’s time to pick up your slime which at this stage will feel like a big sticky mess. Do not despair, slimers! Start passing the slime between one hand and the other. At first, it will leave a lot of the mixture behind on each hand, but after a minute or two a miracle happens. The slime ball not only stops leaving bits of itself behind on your hands, it actually starts to collect the stuff it had previously left behind! As miracles go it’s not up there with the loaves and fishes, but it’s pretty good!

Step 5 – Manipulate the goo.

Now you can start to manipulate the gooey lump, stretching, squashing and so on. Do this for a bit and, et voila!, you have working slime.

Step 6 – Decorate with food colouring and more.

Once you’ve perfected the art, you can start to make fancy slime. For your next attempt, at step 3 add a teaspoon of food colouring or a few sparkly stars. Then continue as normal. Once it’s done, you can even cut it with scissors!

Step 7 – Celebrate!

Finally, sit back, relax and bask in the rare and unexpected sense of achievement that comes with actually completing a craft activity successfully. You probably deserve a nap.