Introduction: How to Make Ninja Stress Balls

By www.thekingofrandom.com
About: Random Weekend Projects

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 you’re turning some flour and a bag of party balloons, into a colorful batch of superhero stress balls.

Step 1: Watch the Video!

Step 2: What You'll Need

All you 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.

If you cut a common water bottle in half, it’ll turn upside down and form a makeshift funnel. You can use this to start filling your juice bottle with flour, and you’re going to need about 3/4 of a cup.

Shaking the funnel up and down rapidly, transfers the flour into the juice bottle.

Step 3: Geting the Flour in the Balloon

The next step is to get it inside a balloon. You need to find 3 balloons that are all the same color, and for this first one, I’m going to choose yellow.

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 balloon 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.

Step 4: Massage and Compress

Pinch the neck of the balloon and pull it off the bottle, so you can let the air out, but it will be important to pinch it off again before it starts spewing out flour dust.

You still need to get as much air out of the balloon as you 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.

Get ready for the next step by carefully cleaning 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.

Step 5: More Layers for Durability

While that’s settling down, prepare the other balloons by cutting the ends off them as well.

Pulling them open, you should be able to get all your fingers inside. If you stretch them open wide enough, you can place the center over the flour ball, then wrap it around to the underside. That’ll seal the flour inside, and hold everything together firmly. You can then remove any little ripples, by pulling the edges until it looks nice and smooth.

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.

You 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.

Step 6: The Mask

To form the mask, just make 4 x “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 should have a relatively circular hole right in the center.

Putting the mask on the ninja ball is as simple as turning the band inside out, then wrapping it around the outside.

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 it.

Step 7: Ninja Turtle Eggs

Just for fun I made 4 solid green balls with blue, purple, orange and red ninja masks. Now I know you can totally see where I went with this. Baby ninja turtle eggs.

Now check this out. If you 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. 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.

Step 8: Superhero Powerballs

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.

Step 9: More Projects

Well now you know how to take a sack of flour and handful of party balloons and convert them into squishy, superhero stress balls.

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

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