How to make Crystals

So I found another super awesome idea on Pinterest from Housing a Forest, which is a great blog with lots of great ideas to do with kids. 

The crystals are made by soaking pipecleaners into a borax solution. You first make the shape you want out of pipecleaners. We did Easter eggs and chicks but you can do any shape, how beautiful would snowflakes be in the winter, or flowers for wedding decorations.

Once the pipecleaners are shaped how you want tie them to a string and find glass containers to suspend them in. On Housing a Forest she used large mason jars but I couldn't find any in my house so I found an old pickle jar and some other storage containers we weren't using.

The borax solution is 3 cups of boiling water to 1/2 cup of borax. Stir to dissolve. Then put your pipecleaner creation in and tie to a pencil so it's not touching the bottom. I tried 2  in one container since I could find any others and it worked, just try to have them not touching otherwise they would probably get stuck together. 

Now leave it over night. 

Before I went to bed I took a bit and could see the crystals starting to form.

And here are the final product. They look super cool. The crystals stay on pretty good. I wouldn't let little ones play with them since borax is toxic (or something).

You can see that the size of container and concentration of the borax solution created larger crystals on the egg above and smaller ones on the chick.

This was one of the eggs that shared a container with another one and crystals still formed. 

I think we will be trying this again - nice to have another thing to use the borax I bought for the flubber we made years ago.