This week I wanted to try out a different type of DIY. I'm not making a craft in this one. So supposedly a mixture of baking soda and vinegar will make a balloon blow up and float like a helium substitute. I saw this and was very interested to see if it would work.
So what you are going to need for this experiment is baking soda, vinegar, an empty water bottle, and some balloons. Another optional material would be a funnel which I didn't have so I will later show you what I used. The first step to this DIY is to fill up the water bottle about 1/3 of the way with vinegar. As you can see in this picture I didn't have a funnel to use so what I used was parchment paper. I just rolled it up into a funnel like shape that fit in the top of the bottle and then I taped it closed. It worked great too! So next you are going to want to is add baking soda into the balloon until its about 1/2 of the way full. The next thing is to carefully put this bottom of the balloon onto the top of the water bottle but you want to be really careful that none of the baking soda falls out and goes into the vinegar. This is because if the reaction happens before the balloon is secure onto the bottle it will react and explode everywhere and you will have a big mess on your hands! Once you are 100% sure that the balloon is tightly on the top of the bottle you want to hold the balloon around the bottle to make sure it doesn't come off and tip the balloon up so the baking soda goes into the vinegar. They will react and are supposed to blow up the balloon and act like helium.
So let go over how this worked for me. I was very excited and had pretty high hopes for this project. I really wanted it to work! How cool would it be to make your balloons float that easily? Well when the baking soda and vinegar started to react and the gas started blowing up the balloon I was ecstatic! Once it was filled up all of the way and there was no longer any gas blowing up the balloon anymore I left it on the bottle and let it go in hopes that it would stay upright. Sadly, it flopped right over and didn't stay up! this was super discouraging, so I took it off of the bottle and tied it and put it on my table and sure enough it sat there just like a balloon would if you blew it up. I was pretty upset but I guess if you hate blowing up balloons this is an alternative that could work for you!
RATINGS:
MESSINESS: 2/10 For me this was not very messy. If you aren't careful this can be a HUGE mess but for me I didn't have any problems. You just need to be careful when you pour the vinegar in the bottle and the baking soda into the bottle that you make sure it goes where it needs to go and not on the table instead. Also you want to make sure you don't have any accidental baking soda and vinegar reactions because they react hard and it would get everywhere if it isn't enclosed.
SIMPLICITY: 2/10 This is super easy there aren't even any measurements. You really can't mess anything up in this as long as at some point the two ingredients mix.
FUN: 2/10 It was not fun but it wasn't not fun. This was a super quick thing and nothing about it was super fun but nothing was really annoying or hard to do. It would have been a lot of fun if it had worked and actually made the balloon float.
OVERALL: 3/10 This wasn't fun and didn't work but it was a hard task and wasn't a big deal that it didn't work. There really isn't much that you risk in this process it doesn't take many materials. On the other hand it did blow up a balloon so it actually did do something.
WOULD I DO IT AGAIN: No, definitely not. For this project I found out the result of if it worked or not and my result was that it did not work! If i find out later that I did something wrong or there is a new way to do it that actually works it's possible that I will try it again. There is a really good chance I will not be doing this again.