Summer bubbles

One of my favorite memories of college was spending an afternoon with a roommate making bubbles of ever increasing size. We started with little wire coat hanger loops and ended up with loops of various composition and diameters of more than a meter. When my cousin Sammy visited last summer, she was fascinated by the smaller versions of bubble makery. Leading up to this summer’s visit, we’ve both been looking forward to bigger and better bubbles.

We used a small plastic pool to hold the bubble recipe. I googled a number of recipes for large bubbles and adapted one out of them. In a 5 gallon bucket we mixed 5 gallons of water, 2 containers of soap, and 1 bottle of glycerine. We tried hoola hoops of various sizes wrapped in ace bandages, but given the bubble mixture and winds, a smaller sized hoop about 35cm in diameter. It was fashioned out of a scrap of 12-2 romex that we had leftover from the construction of our home. The loop was wrapped in elastic bandage to allow more bubble mixture absorption and a handle made it much easier to.. handle.

We had a great time making bubbles (and taking more than 500 pictures). You can see a small set of these shots here at flickr. In the photo above, the bubble is caught during its final moments, popping from right to left.

Whatever you do, have a fun and safe 4th of July!