How to Make Clear Slime

I originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

Slime is a wonderful sensory experience, and I'm thrilled that so many young people are embracing the joy of exploring interesting textures (there are no interesting textures on their phones!). Making slime is also a terrifically educational activity, with problem-solving and reading and following instructions combined with quite a lot of chemistry and not a little bit of physics, as well.

To make clear slime, I consulted my own resident slime-making expert. She's put in hundreds of hours making slime, and is here with us today to teach you how to make clear slime, the Holy Grail of slimes. Syd's clear slime isn't your ordinary, everyday "clear" slime that's actually milky or white, she tells me. When she says that her slime is clear, she means it is CLEAR.

As in crystal!

So read along as the world's slimiest kid takes the task of making clear slime and breaks it down so simply that even the average non-slimer adult can follow it.

To make clear slime, you will need:

• Clear Elmer's glue. I used to be able to buy this by the gallon, but lately, I've only found smaller containers for sale. I sure hope the gallon size comes back soon!
• Hot water. The water should be hot, but still, a comfortable temperature for a kid to touch. For mobile slime-making (yes, this is something that she does...), Syd boils a kettle of water, then pours it into a thermos for transport.
• Contact lens solution. Buy the cheapest on the market for this project, making sure that it contains boric acid.
• Baking soda.
• Two mixing bowls, a spoon, and a resealable container for storage.

1. Pour 1/2 cup of clear glue into a bowl. Remember that kids do this, so don't worry about trying to make your measurements too fussy. The important thing is that you're using CLEAR glue, not white. You can use white glue for other slimes, but then your slime won't be clear!

2. Mix in 1 tbsp of saline solution. This is also known as contact lens solution.

So here's a thing that I want to tell you about: we're going to talk about borax. When slime-making first got big, there was an actual backlash as people started FREAKING OUT that their kids were touching borax. As alternatives, people started posting slime recipes that don't use borax. Some of those recipes are great, some are not, and lots of them use contact lens solution as their substitute for borax.

Y'all, contact lens solution and borax both come from boron! They're pretty much the same, just that one is in powder form and the other is dissolved into a solution.

Not that I think that you should even force your kids to avoid borax, because I don't think that at all. Heck, my kids were making laundry soap from borax with their bare hands at the age of eight (they probably should have been wearing gloves, but still). Borax is FINE, Friends. Sure, if they bathe in it every day for a month it'll irritate their skin, but so will pool water.

3. In a separate container, dissolve 1/2 tsp of baking soda into 1/2 cup of hot water. Stir it well and make sure that it dissolves completely.

4. Once the baking soda is completely dissolved, pour it into the glue mixture. Try to pour it over the entire surface of the glue mixture.

5. Wait approximately a minute, then stir. Knead if necessary. 

At first, the mixture will be a goopy mess but continue stirring and you'll be able to see when the slime activates because it will start to ball up. It will still be sticky when you start to knead it but keep working it and it will become ever more elastic and non-Newtonian until it's the perfect slime.

You will have some of your baking soda and water solution left in the bowl, and that's perfectly fine and normal.

One thing that your slime will not start out as is perfectly clear, for the simple fact that you just kneaded a ton of bubbles into it.

If you really want perfectly clear slime, then pop it into an airtight container and let it sit for a day. The next day, it will be clear!

Note that as soon as you start playing with it, though, you'll start kneading bubbles back into it. This picture is of the clear slime that Syd has played with for a while, and you can see the bubbles:

Pro Tip: Syd stores her slime in small plastic deli containers to keep it fresh--and off of my carpet! She tells me that this particular slime will lose its bounce after several days, but it's easy to reactivate it. To reactive this clear slime, dissolve 1/2 tsp baking soda in 1/2 cup hot water. Pour the older slime mixture into this solution, stir, and then knead it when it becomes firmer. Keep the reactivated slime and discard the excess water.

Homeschool Art: The Fake Slime Spill

We did not do this project on the first day of April, but it WOULD make a terrific April Fool's Day prank!

You might remember that Syd has been obsessed with slime since... honestly, I think it's been since before slime became a universal tween obsession. It's been a looooooong time. We've been making oobleck and gak since the kids were babies, but Syd, especially, has taken ownership of the slimer lifestyle since at least 2015.

She did an entire science fair presentation on slime in 2017!

In 2018, while she was away at camp, I set her up with an entire slime studio space, and I haven't yet regretted having one place where all the slime stuff lives.

Well, I mean sometimes I regret it a little, because it usually looks like this:



But whatever. We don't like that carpet anyway. And we didn't keep our stuff nice even before we had kids, so it's not like they're even the main reason that all our stuff looks like junk.

For this art lesson, I found a slime tie-in and we also explored our other favorite pastime, tormenting Matt.

To begin, we watched this excellent video from PBS Digital Studios:



Our local university's art museum actually owns one of these Duchamp fountains, so we've seen it several times before. There are also these stories of artist's pranks to peruse:

• Banksy destroys his painting (and graffiti in general, a topic that we've also explored and that interests Will, in particular)
• Students put a pineapple in a museum.
• Teenagers put glasses on the floor of an art museum.

I think the most salient point to make is that by utilizing an artifact to comment on an aspect of our social conditioning, you can defend the claim that this IS art!

What we're about to do, however, is not art. It's just messing with Matt.

I taught the kids that adding paint to white glue will dye the glue. Here, we're using powdered tempera, ideally to keep the consistency of the glue/paint mixture thick, but you can also use craft acrylics (we still have a couple of bottles of this particular set of homemade school glue dyed with acrylic paint, and they're still great!):

Cover a tray with a piece of waxed paper, then comes the best part: make a spill!

The kids tried a couple of different containers, but the most realistic, I think, was the exact same little deli containers that Syd uses to store her slime. Will made a fake spill from a plastic cup, but it didn't end up looking like anything that would be consumable.

After the spills are settled, you have to find an out-of-the-way spot for them to dry out for several days. I didn't mark the time on this, but I wouldn't have been surprised if it was at least a couple of weeks before the kids could peel their fake spills away from the waxed paper.

Shortly before Matt was expected to come home one evening, Syd chose her favorite of the fake spills and set it on the rug in our family room--not right in the middle, but off in a corner, where it could conceivably have gone unnoticed by us during the day. It was next to the coffee table, as if fallen from where a careless child had set it.

I wasn't in the family room when Matt came through, but I clearly heard him saying, "What is THIS?!? SYDNEY!!!!! GET IN HERE!!!!!!!" Bless her heart, she couldn't even keep a straight face for a second, which just made Matt madder until he reached down to pick up the slime container and the whole thing lifted neatly off the rug and the prank was clear. It was possibly one of the best moments of Syd's life to date.

Unfortunately, the prank only worked once, as a similar slime spill in our bedroom was ignored, and so was one in the playroom (fortunately for Syd, because that one was NOT one of the fake ones...). But the kids had made their point, using a created artifact to comment on the social norms of family life and the surface-level assumptions of what it means to be "clean" in society today.

Okay, I made that up. This one wasn't art--just a prank!

The Kid Makes Handmade Slime

My tactile, hands-on, crafty, busy kid has busied herself at the big table that we bought for just that purpose, in the playroom that we designated for just that reason, ever since we bought this house. It's one of the reasons why we bought this house, that room that I knew could be a room of the children's very own. The big kid lounges on the floor, reading or coloring (which is why I have two giant floor pillows in progress taking up half of my study/studio space), but the table is mostly the little kid's domain, for Perler beads, play dough, drawing, jewelry-making, and mostly slime.

Slime for days. Slime for YEARS!

All of the little kid's slimes have original recipes. They all have original names. They all have peculiar qualities that she can tell you all about. None of the rest of us really give her handmade slime hobby the respect that it deserves, so the other morning I took my camera, found her in the playroom (making slime, of course)--

--and said, "Okay, Kid. Show me all your slime."

This is not EVEN all her slime, because my camera battery died. It is, instead, a fairly representative selection:

This is Pink Speck Slime:

It contains glue, red liquid watercolor, liquid starch, glitter, and the tiniest little bit of shaving cream:

This is White Fluffy Slime:



It's made from glue, shaving cream, and liquid starch:

This is Purple Putty Slime:



It's made from one teaspoon thermic powder (which did nothing), glue, liquid starch, and red liquid watercolor:

This is Blue Speck Slime:



It's made from glue, glitter, and liquid starch:

This is Purple Fluffy Slime:



It's made from purple powdered tempera, glue, liquid starch, and shaving cream:

This is Black Glitter Slime:



It's made from a giant heap of glitter, the smallest amount possible of glue, and liquid starch. It's the glitter that makes it black:

This is Yellow Butter Slime:



It's made from stale yellow Model Magic, glue, and liquid starch:

This is White Cloud Slime:



It's made from glue, shaving cream, and liquid starch:

This is Clear Jelly Slime:



It's made from water, clear glue, and liquid starch:

This is Mash-up Slime:

It's made from all of the excess slimes that wouldn't fit into their containers:

This is Pink Floam Slime:

It's made from clear glue, pink floam beads, and liquid starch:

This is the little kid's personal favorite, White Snowy Slime:



It's made from clear glue, a bunch of glitter, liquid starch, and shaving cream:

This is another White Fluffy Slime or White Cloud Slime, although when I told the kid that she had showed me both a White Fluffy Slime and a White Cloud Slime already, she rolled her eyes at me, and when I pointed out that she'd just rolled her eyes at me, she informed me that she was just looking up at the door instead:



It's made from glue, a lot of shaving cream, and liquid starch (and a sarcastic tone and a couple more eye rolls, it seems):

This is Blue Floam Slime:



It's made from glue, blue foam beads, and liquid starch:

This is White Normal Slime:



It's made from glue and liquid starch:

This is Green Sand Slime:



It's made from glue, a little bit of green kinetic sand, and liquid starch:

This is Clear Unicorn Pee Slime:



It's made from clear glue, liquid starch, and some glitter:

Since slime making is the little kid's area of interest, I buy her whatever she asks for as far as slime ingredients go, and sometimes, if I happen upon a recipe with an unusual ingredient, I'll surprise her with something she hasn't asked for--that's how she ended up with the foam beads, which are a hit, the thermochromic powder, which she hasn't been able to make work so far, and some metallic pigments, which she hasn't experimented with yet.

I also bought her saline solution, which she used to make a whole series of slimes that led her to decide that she far prefers to work with liquid starch.

Here are the little kid's favorite slime-making supplies so far:

• 2-ounce plastic storage containers. These work well for giving slime away, especially on Valentine's Day.
• 8-ounce plastic storage containers. These are the standard size that she uses.
• glitter. The kid has recently also asked for large-flake glitter, so we'll make a trip to the craft store this weekend to hunt some down.
• clear glue. I buy this by the gallon.
• foam balls. The dye comes off of these balls when it's mixed into slime, so the kid says that you might as well just buy the white foam balls and dye the slime your color of choice.
• glitter glue. The kid is just as happy dyeing and glittering her slime from scratch, but she likes these, too, so I buy them if I see them on sale.
• white glue. I also buy this by the gallon.
• Stay-Flo liquid starch. This is the kid's ingredient of choice for all of her slimes.
• miscellany. The kid has experimented with all kinds of mix-ins for her slime, everything from sand to beads to dry rice and any other ephemera that comes her way. She also likes to find unusual ingredients to make slime from. She made some awesome slime from stale Model Magic, but the slime that she tried to make from leftover play dough turned into a slimy nightmare that still makes me shudder a bit to think of it.

I don't always appreciate the kid's passion for slime making; it's sticky, and messy, and that playroom table will likely never recover, sigh. But I figure that I bought the playroom table for the kids to use, and the stickiness and messiness is just the kid feeding her senses. She's being creative, she's exercising her STEM skills with all that creating and remixing recipes and discovering new combinations, and she's engaging in whole-body physics and chemistry by exploring the properties of a whole series of non-Newtonian fluids. 

And she's mastering the entire field of slime making, and experiencing the confidence and satisfaction of that mastery. What more could I ask glue and starch to do for a person?

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to random little towns, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!