Everyone should be playing with balls.
Those are indeed quite nice and great for learning, anything that does not roll away is goodness.
I’m not cleaning that up.
CRAZY. I just made some of these last night!
(I knew BoingBoing was accessing my webcam! lol)
…oh and I used sand, and used more ballons offset at different angles to get a perfectly very round ball that returns to round. because OCD. the ones in the above article would drive me bonkers. 
I have making stress balls for a few months now in different colors. I use rice although flour makes for a squishier ball. Flour is tougher to work with. I use a small kid sized empty water bottle. Also I have found it useful to use a small binder clip to hold the inflated balloon shut when trying to fit the balloon on the bottle. 12 inch helium quality balloons work best but the regular 9 inch balloons can do in a pinch.
I used to do this when I learned to juggle with one difference: Skip the bottle, and instead put the rice in a small plastic bag. Tie it off and wrap the balloon around the bag.
It lets you eyeball the size of the balls and they last slightly longer before rice starts coming out (it turns out that two layers of rubber pressing against each other while being thrown around doesn’t last forever)
Hmm. These are quick and easy, but also fragile. Over time, the oils in your hands and general dirt will burn the balloon. Some people use multiple balloon layers to get around this problem.
If you put a lot of mileage on your props, you’ll need more durable ones. I went to 5 balls on drug-store “super pinkie” sponge balls, but they tend to bounce and roll when dropped. The best really cheap but durable juggling balls are tennis balls weighted with sand or pennies. You can cut along the seam, insert your weight (about a 35mm film canister full of sand is sufficient), and then re-seal with rubber cement or epoxy. These last well. If you need festive colors for a performance, you can cover them with a balloon as well by cutting the neck off and stretching it around the ball. This suffers from the same problem as balloon bean bags, but replacing the balloon is simple and balloons are cheap.
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