Unpoppable Bubbles

For every Try Me! Tuesday post this month I've tried out bubble recipes. And today is no different. (I figured to end summer, I would try out a bunch of summer fun ideas). And well I wanted to try out giant bubbles, but I don't have the proper wand to make that happen. (I'll save that for next summer or whenever we need some more bubble fun)

Instead I was intrigued by the idea of unpoppable bubbles. Bubbles are such a flimsy thing. So i really wanted to know if I could make them slightly unpoppable.  I mean there's no way they wouldn't pop eventually, but I wanted to see if I could delay popping for a while. And I wanted to see if it was possible with common household ingredients.

Project

See if the following recipes will make unpoppable bubbles and which (if either) makes better and stronger bubbles

Recipe #1

Recipe #2

(I couldn't find the actual website for either, but if you just search unpoppable bubbles  on Pinterest, they are both near the top.

Results

Recipe #1

So I didn't use distilled water and I used Ajax instead of Joy soap. Other than that I followed the recipe. I mixed everything together and gently stirred it all together. Then I let it sit over night. (I'm not sure why that's important, but I did it anyways!)

In the end I ended up with a big bowl of soap solution that looks like this:

Next I wanted to see how well it would work.

The first thing I wanted to see was how many bubbles I could make with the solution. (I am after all still trying to find a replacement homemade bubble recipe!) Most of the time I was only able to get one or two bubbles (occasionally I would get a whole stream of bubbles, but that few and far between).

And then I wanted to see if they were unpoppable bubbles. Sadly they were not. I tried to catch a couple in my hands and while some bubbles didn't immediately pop on the first contact, they did pop on the second contact.

That gave me a little hope that if I switched my ingredients to joy dish soap and distilled water that I might be able to make unpoppable bubbles.

I guess this another project I'll have to try again.

Recipe #2

Once again I used Ajax dish soap (I just happened to have a big bottle laying around and I don't really like it while washing dishes.  So I made it into my crafting soap). And I ran out of corn syrup while mixing everything together, so I had to half the recipe. (Which I think makes a more manageable batch)

In the end it looks like this

The first time I tested it, I didn't realize I had read the recipe wrong and had put in equal parts of everything. And apparently that is a perfect homemade bubble recipes. I was able to get a bunch of bubbles on most blows. (So at least I solved one bubble problem this month!)

So once I realized my mistake I mixed in the rest of the dish soap (gently of course as to not waste my bubbles in the mixing process). And I had a similar result to the amount of bubbles I was able to blow off the wand.

Unfortunately they were all completely poppable bubbles. 

Conclusion

So while I found a great homemade bubble recipe; I didn't find a good recipe to make unpoppbale bubbles. I guess that's something to work on and I'm sure that I'll figure it out eventually!