Sunday, April 29, 2012

Pet Jellyfish

     After visiting the aquarium last week, we decided to make pet jellyfish.  I apparently cannot follow instructions, so ours did not turn out nearly as cool as the one online. The girls had fun though. Here are the instructions I glanced at (I would say used, but I obviously didn't): http://bhoomplay.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/diy_jellyfish_eng/

     Like it says we started with a transparent plastic bag and cut off the handles. This is where I didn't read (well one place) and I just cut up the sides and across the bottom. Then we used 1 half of the bag for each jellyfish.


     We picked up the center of the bag to make a head and tied around it with string. We did make sure to leave a hole where we could add water to the head.  Unfortunately I think this is where most of our problems were.  I think the heads were too small compared to the rest of the bag. But the opening of our bottle was too small for any of it, so while pushing it in to the bottle all the water seems to come out of the head.

     We cut the rest of the bag to make the tentacles. I think we made too many and should have cut away more of the bag.  The girls liked playing with them out of the bottle, so they did that a little while.


      Then we filled our bottles, and added food coloring. We put some water into each jellyfishes head, and pushed them into the bottle head first.  As I said before, most of the water spilled out, and then our jellyfish wouldn't sink. The girls still liked them.  I am tempted to drag one out and try to redo it a bit or maybe just start over. If I do I will let you know how it turns out.



     To stick with our fish theme I made some octopus hotdogs for lunch.  Nadia got excited when i asked her what they were and squealed, "Jellies!" Close enough. I showed her the 8 legs, so she knew it was an octopus. They sure weren't around long!