Comment by grogs
15 years ago
Nothing is free, but can be a negligible cost. You can make temporary paper glue out of flour and water, you can boil it down to use for paper mache. You can add food colouring to your water & flour mix to make paint.
Food colouring cost money, as does flours, but you can make your own from plants/cereals if you really feel the need.
Either you have enough money to buy some glue, or you can spend time teaching your kids how to make it. If your kids have an impressive enough attention span, you'll be teaching them something by making the glue, even more if you make the flour!
Money just makes things convient/easy. You're trying to teach, lack of money helps that.
>You can make temporary paper glue out of flour and water
Not useful for sealing submerged parts of a shiny metal structure though.
>Either you have enough money to buy some glue, or you can spend time teaching your kids how to make it.
This is how it seems to go. However practically you need grain, so you need a trip to a field with grain in, which would be a bus ride, which would cost more than walking to the shops to buy glue.
Once you're at the field (assuming you have permission), you'll need to gather the grain. Scythe? Sacks? I know from experience that you get little flour from the grain you can hand collect and grind with a couple of flat stones in a couple of hours. Were talking young kids here too, getting them to gather grain won't be much fun when they're moaning "I thought we were making junk boats ... can't we make our boats".
I'm not trying to be completely obstructive (honest!) - making our own epoxy sounds more fun (but again, hidden costs) - but perhaps these things will come later.
That is kind of what I meant by hidden costs.
To recapitulate often one doesn't realise the benefit of the resources one has available. Making a piece of furniture for example someone will say "use your drill press", "use a nail gun", "use an orbital sander", etc.: obviously once one has these things the usage cost is near zero but the acquisition cost is high. These acquisition costs get hidden.