Awhile back, I had told Dave about a fun solar system project I found on a blog (well, more accurately, I found it on Pinterest), and we knew it would be a big hit with Tyler. A couple of weeks ago, we decided to try it out. Here is the project in pictures….
First, we blew up balloons to match the different sizes of the sun and 9 planets (we’re still counting Pluto, even though it’s a Dwarf planet).
After we blew up and labeled the balloons (so we could keep track of which was which), we started wrapping the balloons in embroidery thread which had been dipped in a mixture of equal parts glue and water.
Here is Tyler wrapping Venus. Messy and fabulous!
Tyler got to pick the colors of thread we used for each planet. He’s very particular about the colors he uses when drawing planets! We wanted to make sure he got to do them how he wanted.
This part of the process took quite awhile, and took many packets of embroidery thread. Here he is wrapping Earth, and later (at the end), we used about 13 rolls of string to cover the entire sun.
Here you will see Mars, Earth, and Venus sitting out to dry, and Dave placing the “Great Red Spot” on the side of Jupiter.
Tyler helped a bit, but for the most part, Dave was the one with his fingers in glue wrapping each planet. The sun took a lot of string, and a lot of glue!
The instructions recommended leaving them out to dry for at least 24 hours. We thought we’d speed up the process by hanging them outside to dry on the clothesline, but didn’t realize that the AZ heat would shrink the balloon—and the string along with it. Once we noticed that, we had to pop and remove a few of the balloons and blow up new balloons inside of the string (after misting it to get the string to stretch again). It worked fine, and you’d never know they had shrunk. After that, we left them inside to dry.
Tyler was excited to finally be able to pop and remove the balloons. Here he is with his Earth.
After they all dried and we removed the balloons, Dave sprayed them with a decoupage finish to harden them a little more, and hung them to dry.
Final step was to find a way to put some rings on Saturn. Dave cut them out of cardboard and let Tyler color them. You saw a glimpse of these rings in this post. Remember?
And here is the final product hung up in Tyler’s room. Dave had to go one step further before hanging them, however. He looked up the distance of each planet from the sun, and hung each planet proportionate to their actual distance from the sun.
You’ll see in this picture that the sun is on the right, surrounded by the 4 terrestrial planets, and then we have Jupiter (complete with Great Red Spot) and Saturn, and on the other corners of the room are Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.
Tyler’s room is so much fun! He has these cool planets hanging from the ceiling, glow in the dark stars on his walls, and planet posters hung all around. He also has a his D-back bobble-heads on one shelf and his model trains on another.
We were hoping to find a way to make these glow in the dark, but we haven’t had any luck. Dave was hoping to make them glow different colors, but it turns out that they really only make glow in the dark paint in green.
The only thing I would recommend to anyone trying this project (or a similar one---maybe to make Easter eggs?), would be to make sure you don’t use too much glue. I think towards the end of our first batch of glue, it started getting thicker, so some of the planets have a thin layer of glue pretty much all the way around where the balloon (see Jupiter and Saturn above) was. You can see the difference in the sun, where there is no remnants of glue, and Jupiter where there is a layer of glue between the string. It still looks super cool though, and we are excited about how it turned out! So is Tyler too, of course. He loves doing projects, especially if they have to do with the solar system! Thanks so much to Dave for initiating this fun project, and for the patience he had to spend much of his weekend working on it.
Here is where I originally found the instructions for this project.
