These ninja balls are customizable, mashable, and perfect for juggling. The best part is
you can make them at home for practically nothing. In this project we’re turning some
flour and a bag of party balloons, into a colorful batch of superhero stress balls.
All we need to start this project is a variety of latex party balloons, and a container like
a juice bottle. This one has a wide mouth, and you’ll see why that’s better in just
a minute. Now, if we cut a common water bottle in half, it’ll turn upside down and form
a makeshift funnel. We can use this to start filling our juice bottle with flour, and we’re
going to need about 3/4 of a cup. You can see that shaking the funnel up and down rapidly,
transfers the flour into the juice bottle. And now the next step, is to get it inside
a balloon. We need to find 3 balloons that are all the same color, and for this first
one, I’m going to choose yellow. Now to get the flour inside, simply blow a balloon
and twist the neck around 4-5 times so the air is trapped inside. Stretch the mouth of
the ballon over top of the juice bottle, and when it’s on securely, just let the balloon
go. If you turn the bottle upside down and squeeze it repeatedly, you can see the flour
transfers easily, without making any mess. Alright, let’s pinch the neck of the balloon
and pull it off the bottle, so we can let the air out, but it will be important to pinch
it off again before it starts spewing out flour dust. We still need to get as much air
out of the balloon as we can, and massaging the base will help compress the flour and
move any trapped gasses to the top. At this point you should be able to let go, and the
flour will stay neatly inside the balloon. Ok, to get ready for the next step let’s
carefully clean the outside of the balloon with a damp cloth, then slowly and carefully
use a pair of scissors to cut the excess off the top. While that’s settling down, it’s
a good time to prepare the other balloons by cutting the ends off them as well. When
you pull them open, you should be able to get all your fingers inside, and if you stretch
them open wide enough to place the center over the flour ball, then wrap it around to
the underside, it’ll seal the flour inside, and hold everything together firmly. You can
remove any little ripples by pulling the edges until it looks nice and smooth. Now if you
want to make sure this never comes apart, one option is to use a few dabs of super glue
on the underside of the lip. The glue bonds really well to rubber, and will help prevent
the balloons from pulling apart. Now we can also increase the durability by adding a couple
more balloons. This makes it exponentially stronger, and depending on how firm you want
it, you can add as many layers as you want, but try not to use less than 3. I used 4 balloons
for this one, and the finishing step is to add a black ninja mask. To form that, just
make “U” shaped cuts around the edges of a black balloon, then fold it in half so
you can cut a “U” shape out of the side. When you open it up you’ll have a hole right
through the center. And putting the mask on the ninja ball is as simple as turning the
band inside out, then wrapping it around the outside. Now try matching one of the holes
on the mask with the seam on the ball, and the seam will virtually disappear. This is
really cool because most people will have no idea how you made this. Just for fun I
tried making a couple more balls with monochromatic colors, and those ended with an awesome two
tone effect. Then I made 4 solid green balls with blue, purple, orange and red ninja masks.
Now I know you can see totally see where I’m with this. Baby ninja turtle eggs. Now check
this out. If we stack them on top of each other and push down hard, you can get a feel
for how squishy they really are. Not only that, but they’ll stick to each other as
well. I tried smashing them into the ground and was amazed by how resilient they are.
And check out how they all formed different shapes. I wonder if this could be classified
as modern art. These will hold their shape as long as you don’t mess with them too
much. And if you play around with different color combinations, you can see just how easy
it is to make any superhero theme you can think of. I tried making a whole variety of
different colors, and was impressed that 1 cheap bag of flour, makes over 20 different
toys. The soft rubbery texture makes them easy to grip, so they’re actually perfect
for juggling, and since they’re ridiculously cheap to make, they’re an awesome gift for
kids. Well now you know how to take a sack of flour and handful of party balloons and
convert them into squishy, superhero stress balls. Well that’s it for now. If you liked
this project, perhaps you’ll like some
of my others. Check them out at www.thekingofrandom.com