Odd opener: There’s a surprising way to make sure contextual ads offer you sex toys every time you shop online: get into making giant bubbles. Turns out the best way to make the film for giant bubbles is to add a few stabilisers (specialty personal lubricants) to the mix along with the dish soap. These “personal lubricants” are special enough that they’ll muck-up your contextual ad profile for months! Oh Man – the bubbles you can make though!
You need just three things to make giant bubbles:
- Wands
- Loop
- Bubble Juice
How involved you want to get for each of these parts is up to you. The difference between the performance of the fancy wands and loops and a basic setup is pretty minimal as far as I can tell. The simple kid’s wands I make perform nearly as well as the fancy adult wands. In my opinion, the biggest performance modifier is the bubble juice, and that takes a little patience to dial in.
I recently made a fancy-ish wand and loop. Because it’s a public toy that tends to draw a little attention, I wanted to build something that I could feel good about when it is being inspected by strangers.
The Giant Bubble Wands
I based the handles on my favourite knife – a Helle my brother got me as a gift a while back. These are laminated oak with a little strip of rosewood to fill a void that ran down the spine of the oak. The wood is all offcuts recovered from a local stair shop.
Stained some poplar dowel with black walnut, and covered everything in a few layers of poly. I’d actually recommend staying away from the stain as I find it still bleeds through the finish a bit and can stain hands and clothes, which is a drag.
At the end of the dowel – simple eyelets. It’s sufficient to just use the eyelets on the loop directly. But again, I was trying to make things a little fancy this time around so I made copper rings by shaping a length of hard jewellery copper and then winding/soldering the joint. It looks okay, but I’m not sure if there is any benefit to the bubble making.
It’s a good idea to make a small second set for the kids that are going to be pestering you in the park – the long wands are too hard for them to handle and with the leverage can be quite heavy at the tips.
The Giant Bubble Loop
The loop is made from an unwound cotton mop head. It’s tedious but recommended by the bubbleheads as the best loop material. The loop can be divided into two parts – the top of the loop is 1/3 of the total length, and benefits from being a little thicker so that it holds more liquid. I braided my top rope, but the effect for me is minimal. The bottom two-thirds and single strand. There’s also a washer to weigh down the bottom strand. Again, this is totally optional and I’m just as happy with the wands I’ve made that don’t have it. If you want to add the washer, I recommend sanding it smooth and perhaps sealing it with primer.
The Giant Bubble Juice
In my opinion, this and environmental conditions have the biggest effect on the success of your bubbles. I tried a couple of the simpler recipes but wasn’t that impressed. I’ve settled on Wayne Schmidt’s recipe because it is well researched and it has given me good results so far. Seriously, Read every word of this page if you want to make the best bubbles. Wayne is meticulous and well-reasoned, and any time spent reading about his experiments will be time well spent.
Hit me up if you’ve got any giant bubble questions, or wanna go make some bubbles!
