Calm Down Bottles

I'm sure by now just about every mother has heard of Calm Down Bottles. Two or so years ago, my SIL made them for her class but I didn't bite. But recently, I wondered whether my kids could benefit from such a tool, so I followed the easy-to-follow directions to make my own. I even let the kids pick their colors: red and green. I hadn't realized you could mess them up so badly. My two concerns were that a) instead of using extra fine glitter, the store I was at only had a jumbo pack of that so I settled for a smaller pack of fine, but holographic glitter, and b) while I was able to track down Alene's Tacky Glue, I apparently neglected to remember the "clear gel" part of that description. But I used smaller bottles, so I hoped that I wouldn't need to add the glue. These were my results:

 From left to right (the first two being Hint bottles, approx. 16 oz., and the last two being Gatorade bottles, approx. 20 oz.): red glitter glue with red holographic glitter (which didn't work); green glitter with no holographic glitter (also didn't work); red glitter glue with red holographic glitter and much more water (which was closer, but the glitter suspended for much too long and more water made it too thin); and just green glitter glue (which didn't work but for different reasons than the previous approaches). I read the revisions and used extremely hot water to melt the glue, but I think the issue might have been that I used holographic glitter. It looked very fine but it must have been heavier, because after shaking, the glitter would stay suspended for way too long. And if I lowered the ratio of glitter to water, there wasn't enough glitter in the bottle for the effect. But it's okay, the sun will set and another day will begin.