Wednesday 10 December 2014

Christmas Jingle Bells at Daresbury

Tuesday 9th December and we were off to Daresbury labs for our final Chemistry at Work Day of this year with MerseySTEM.
It being pretty close to the holidays we decided to make this one a bit special so when it came to making the usual bath bombs as part of our hands on take home make for the session we created Christmas puddings.

Getting the puddings right took quite a bit of experimenting - we usually use liquid food colouring for the bombs but it is very hard to get a proper brown so after some research we eventually coloured the brown base using powdered pigment especially created for cosmetics which we made into solution - it took quite a bit of trial and error to get a good pudding colour that wouldn't stain the bath, the towels and the person!!
We had splotchy brown hands for a few days.

We topped it off with plain white mix and a holly sprig.

Then of course the all important fragrance.......finally after quite a bit of sniff testing we decided the bath bombs would be fragranced with mince pie mix which made the whole room smell spicy and seasonal. At first I thought it was a very seasonal and cheerful smell but after making a few I began to long for the usual bubblegum fragrance. I am not sure it really was mince pies more like mulled wine without the drink! Quite how that will work in a bath I am not sure plus when we demonstrated using our little bath the water was a decided brown - not the best look in a bath.
Fortunately in a real bath the brown will dilute to a peachy tinge!

There were some teachers from schools we had met before and it was good to see some old friends and to make new ones especially as they joined our mailing list for the newsletter.

So we have completed another year of Chemistry at Work days and look forward to being able to join in the fun in 2105.

As I am writing this post I can see we have broken through 6000 hits - thank you to everyone who reads our blog, thank you for your support.

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