Fireworks In A Jar

Mollie and I did a little experiment that I saw on Pinterest the other day. It looked cool, and we had all of the ingredients so why not? Here is the tutorial, fireworks in a jar. 

You just pour a little cooking oil into a bowl, and squeeze in several drops of different colors of food coloring..

 ..I let Mollie do this part..

 Here's what it looked like..

 Then you pour the oil/food coloring mixture into a jar of water. 

Well, this is what we got when we poured it in. Not quite like the picture LOL. The droplets of food coloring were supposed to float on the surface of the water for a minute before getting "too heavy" and eventually releasing the food coloring as they fell to the bottom of the jar. Instead, the droplets seemed to  break apart as soon as they were poured in, and the water immediately turned dark green/blue.

 I figured we just added too much food coloring, so we tried it again with less..

 And this is what we got. A little bit better. Some of the drops of food coloring combined with  the water immediately, but others floated a minute before falling to the bottom, creating the "fireworks".

 I chalked it up to a Pinterest fail (search 'Pinterest fail' on Pinterest or visit this blog. You won't be sorry!) 

Mollie didn't seem to mind that it didn't turn out though. I think she just enjoyed getting to squirt the food coloring and mix things up.

But then that night, I randomly remembered that I had forgotten a step! Which turned out to be a very important step. So the next day we tried again..

 I forgot that after you drop in the food coloring, you're supposed to stir it up with a fork! Here's what it will look like:

 Then when we poured the mixture in it did stay on the top..

 ..and the colors started to fall..

It doesn't exactly look like fireworks, but it was pretty cool to watch, and Mollie has asked to do it again probably five times since. I'm looking forward to doing more little experiments like this with Mollie.