Sensory Bottle Fun!

This week, I made my sweet girl two sensory bottles. They've both been an absolute hit!

 

This first one was super simple - just drop some straight pins (the kind with balls on the ends) into a bottle of baby oil. I get these bottles from the Dollar Tree. Make sure you glue the cap on - I used gorilla glue, super glue didn't seem to hold well on this one. Little Bit likes this bottle because it's small, so she can manipulate it well. She really likes to watch the colorful pins slide along the bottle as she moves it. I think this would be fun for an older child if you included a strong magnet with it, to drag the pins around!

 

She did NOT want to let me see her bottle to take a picture of her playing with it! Every time I tried, she hugged it to her chest.

 I used this tutorial to make her calm down bottle. I did make a few changes, though.

In the tutorial, Johanna used a Smart Water bottle. The one I used is made the same, but it's smaller. It was from a sparkling lemonade I found at WalMart (in the aisle with the energy and sports drinks). It was 17oz and is a nice size for small hands. Tall, but thin. 

I made a simple makeshift double boiler by putting water in a pot and then pouring the bottle of Alene's Clear Gel Glue in a measuring cup and letting it warm in the pot of boiling water (I just used a pot holder to hold the measuring cup above the bottom of the pot - it didn't have to be in the water for long). Then I poured warm water into the glue until it was at about 16.5oz, stirring to "melt" the glue into the water. Then I added some purple glitter and some pink iridescent glitter, stirring until I liked the way it looked! Finally, I let it cool for a bit, then poured it into the bottle using a funnel, and glued the cap on. By the time Little Bit woke up the next morning, the glue on the cap was dry, and her new glitter bottle was ready to play with! 

All in all, the two projects probably would have costed me under $15 even if I had to buy all the supplies brand new, but I had everything except for the gel glue and the sparkling lemonade bottle on hand already, so it was a $3 projects and the pin bottle was free. Works for me! If anyone else has any suggestions for ways they've made different sensory bottles, please feel free to share!

-Ang