hello, everyone! it's emmy! welcome back to another kiddo craft. today, i'm going to show you how to make this.... look at these beautiful borax crystals -- aren't they gorgeous? so you just need a couple ingredients -- borax, pipe cleaners, some water, some heat... so it requires some stovetop and heat, so make sure there's some adult supervision for this. but yeah, it's well worth it -- look at these beautiful crystals. when i was a kid i was obsessed with rocks and crystals and so i am so excited to see this project. so yeah, let's go in the kitchen, and i'll show you how to make this. so you're going to start off with taking three white pipe cleaners and twisting them into a kind of loose coil. something kind of like this, but feel free to shape and bend it any way you like!
next, tie a piece of thread to your coil. so i'm doing this in a pyrex beaker because i happen to have one, but you certainly don't need to do so -- you can do this in a pan as well -- and then just pour the solution into a nice glass container to grow your crystals. so the secret of getting really fat crystals is making a really supersaturated solution. so the way to do that is to have some really hot water -- and you're going to want to actually get it boiling. and then you're just going to add borax. you can find borax in the laundry section at your big box store.
so you're going to add borax to your boiling water. keep pouring it in.... keep pouring it in.... and your solution will get cloudy. you'll actually see the borax kind of collect at the bottom -- and that means you can't add any more. so i used about a liter of solution, and it took about a cup and a half to two cups of borax. so once your solution is supersaturated then you can add your dye if you like -- i'm just using regular old food coloring, and for the first crystal i did, i added about twenty drops of the purple neon food coloring. next you're going to attach a pipe cleaner to a bamboo skewer, and then dunk the whole thing into your solution while it's still hot. then cover the whole thing with a piece of cardboard and allow it to sit at least eight hours or overnight. so twelve hours later this is what i got: a beautiful crystal!
so here's the solution for my first crystal... so then i put it back on the heat, and i brought the solution back to a boil, and then added more borax to it -- again, until it couldn't hold any more borax. and then i added a few drops of blue food coloring and a little bit more purple. and this is about thirty total drops to about a liter of water. i did the same thing and suspended a pipe cleaner, and then, twelve hours later, i got this.... while researching this project, i got most of this information from a blog called "dans le lakehouse," and i'll put the blog information down below. i love this project not only for its beautiful results, but...
this is one of my son's favorite books: it's called rock collecting by roma gans. one of our favorite pages is this and it talks about quartz, and how quartz is an igneous rock, and of course it's a crystal and.... so a project like this really takes that subject home . all right! thanks for watching and yeah, go make something! bye! that's so cool!
