amo...amas...amat

Oh me oh my, do I love them. Enough to drag my little fingers back to the keyboard to write about them on my long neglected blog.

Water beads…
I’d seen them in floral sections of stores before and thought they were, well, just not for me. I couldn’t see using them in a vase. It seems like it would distract from the flowers.

But who needs a vase…or flowers. These things are pure awesome on their own. Add a light box (or in our case, an overhead projector) and you reach a whole new level. 

I bought a tiny bag of what looked like multicolored seed beads. The directions said to mix 10g of beads with one liter of water - seemed extreme. I did it, though, and an hour later the jar looked bee-yoo-tee-ful. Little dots of color evenly distributed throughout the jar. I pulled a few out of the jar and they were so perfectly round and squishy that I figured they were done. I left them in the water anyway and the next morning, there was no water left, just a jar full of beautiful translucent squishy marbles. 

Dave and I were oohing and aahing over them even before the girls saw them. Daisy actually squealed when she saw them. (Clementine was still wrestling with her step stool, so she was a bit behind the curve.) We poured them in a bowl to see how they felt. Dee-lightful. Almost-therapeutic-delightful. It was hard to share it with the little ones.

Daisy and Clementine squished and lifted and dropped and bounced (yes they bounce!) the little balls over and over and over. I eventually needed the kitchen space back, so Dave set up the overhead projector. 

Daisy carefully tippy-toe carried them to living room and set the paper plate on the projector. I was ready to correct her - it wouldn’t be visible on the wall through the plate. Dave was ready to make it a learning experience - I wonder why we can’t see it on the wall. But then we all noticed how freaking cool they looked through the plate. They were no longer three dimensional. We could touch them and feel that they were 3D, but looking at them they strictly two dimensional. It was a fabulous optical illusion.

After marveling at that for a while, we put the beads straight onto the glass. They looked like marbles again, beautiful little marbles.

The girls loved this - going back and forth between how they looked on the projector compared to how they looked on the wall.

We had to be too careful just placing them on the overhead and they were too bouncy to play with them by the handful like we all wanted to. I grabbed a glass bowl and filled it up. Back to tactile delight.

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They looked and felt delightful in the bowl. On the wall, they looked like art.

I only made a fraction of the bag. Then we only played with a fraction of what I made. And apparently these beads keep well in the fridge or can be used to water potted plants. Best $3 I’ve spent in a long long time.

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