Color Chemistry

Saturdays are perfect days for pajamma science around here. That's the day that Maddie and I lounge around and do whatever we feel like doing, which definitely involves not getting dressed! A little science experiment or two keeps us moving and interested.

Our most recent experiment was going to be popcorn dancing. But in getting started we found something more interesting -- colored water.

So we played chemists and tried a few different solutions. First we add food color to just plain water.



Cool. But we can do better than that.

So next we put two tablespoons of baking soda in a big bottle of water, gave a stir and then added our dye. Check this out:





The baking soda helps the dye stay separated, and or stirring made kind of a vortex.





We used red and blue and watched it "storm" in the bottle. It's kind of like creating a hurricane in a jar.

Next we added a little olive oil to a glass of water and voila:





Polka dot color! Maddie loved this one. Probably because we got to use lots of dye. She added yellow, green and red.





So there you go:

• Plain water mixes evenly and without stirring.
• Water and Baking soda keeps the dye separated on top (and does a cool vortex thing).
• Water and olive oil does a polka dot effect before allowing the color to settle on the bottom.

And of course this experiment devolved into how Maddie could stir them all up and mix them together to make icky purple-brown water.


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