Balloon and torch lightsabres

OK, ok, let's get this out of the way before we start. I know these look very inuendoish. Let's have no more mention of that!

First off, gotta give credit where credit is due. The idea for this larking around came from a post from a while back by Zakka Life, showing how they made lightsabres for her son's birthday party out of toilet roll tubes and modelling balloons. Absolutely fab idea! I've been holding off on trying this with the kids until the nights were drawn in and the weather was icky, so that we could experiment with using LED flashlights with it and maybe do a spot of Jedi light painting.

The modelling balloons that I had were kinda skinny little ones, so I had to tape them into the loo roll tubes to work. Also, the flashlights that we had were those little flat LED ones, like this...

So I cut each toilet roll tube in half, so the length of the tube was shorter and you got a brighter result. You wouldn't have to do that if you had a regular shaped torch/flashlight though.
We've done this three times in the last week with three different groups of friends ranging in age from 2 to eight years old, and they all absolutely loved it! No one is going to get hurt fighting with balloons, and the photos that came from a long exposure with the lights off are too much fun entirely. It looks like we have aurora borealis in our livingroom!

It's impressive to note just how much leaping around was actually going on, because the longest exposure photo in this lot was eight seconds!

I made a couple of giant lightbulbs too, that the kids rather liked as nightlights.

For the cost of a packet of modelling balloons, this has provided a hunormously mahoosive amount of indoor entertainment. We'll be doing plenty more of it while we wait out the heavy rain that the next month or so usually brings.