Here is a fun and very easy little project to do with the kids- homemade crystals or sun catchers. This is very inexpensive and you can let your creativity go with what to make.
I have little girls that love hearts and rainbows so we made crystals in the form of hearts in rainbow colors. You might do snowflakes or little animals or flower shapes or letters or really anything that your children might enjoy.
These are pretty in windows or outdoors to decorate play houses and such as little sun catchers. They sparkle like crazy in the sun. You might even make these for Christmas ornaments- they would be very pretty on a Christmas tree or as part of your gift wrap.
All you need are pipe cleaners to make the object and then a box of Borax. Borax is a cleaning product that can be found for a few dollars in the laundry section of stores like Walmart and Target. This entire project will cost you less then $5.00 and you should be able to make tons of crystals and still have leftovers for another project.
Once you soak the pipe cleaners in the Borax solution, they will come out covered in crystals! The end product is very cool and I bet you impress the heck out of your kids ;).
So to get started you just need to assemble a few things you might already have:
- Borax
- Pipe Cleaners in the color of your choice (these are very cheap at Craft Stores or Dollar Stores or Walmart etc..)
- Some sort of string – I actually used floss 🙂
- Some sort of stick- I used a skewer for the grill but a paint stick, ruler, pencil, chopsticks, Popsicle sticks etc… will work
- Container – preferably of glass- for your Borax. The container needs to be large enough for the shape you create with pipe cleaners to not touch the sides or bottom. A mason jar would work, an old pickle jar or pasta sauce jar etc… I used an old vase that was glass.
The first step is to start creating your pipe cleaner shapes. My little girls made lots of little hearts which was an easy shape- if you Google pipe cleaner designs you can find about a million shapes to create. The color of your pipe cleaner is what will show through so the brighter the color the better the result. I got great results with really deep shades of red and purple oh and white was actually very pretty too.
I made a few white snowflakes which we will likely use for our Frozen Brithday party coming soon and then I found these cute Bunny Shapes and I put them in lunchboxes to make the girls smile.
While the kids are doing that, you want to boil 3 cups of water. Once it hits the boiling point add it to your container and add in 2 tablespoons to 1/2 cup of Borax. (Personally I prefer not to have the children handle the Borax because it can be an irritant to the skin or eyes and of course they don’t get near boiling water so this is Mom’s turn.)
Obviously the more Borax you add the more crystals you should get. I got great results with just 2 tablespoons but you might consider experimenting.
Stir with your stick or skewer or whatever.
Next you want to take the shape you created and tie it with string and the end of the string to the stick. The idea is to have the shape dangle in the Borax solution. If it touches the sides or bottoms it will stick and they can be really hard to unstick so try very hard to make sure it hangs free like these hearts:
See how the hearts dangle but they don’t touch each other and they don’t touch the sides? The white one is barely skimming the bottom and both are completely underwater.
I found the floss was awesome because it was very easy to adjust the height of the string from the slippery surface of the floss. I just yanked on one end rather then redoing the knot to make adjustments.
And now your work is done!
You need to sit tight for a whopping 6 hours and once you remove your pipe cleaners from the Borax solution you should have crystals all over it! Just lay them to dry on paper towels and that is it!
These are safe for the kids to handle after just a few minutes of drying. They will be somewhat stiff and hopefully you get a lot of pretty crystals.
One important note- we did a bunch of these and I found that Borax solution turned into cement on the bottom of my vase. You can kind of see the white stuff at the bottom in the photo above. I was nervous the vase was ruined at first but I ran it through the dishwasher and all the Borax came out fine.
This is a very fun activity and I hope you give it a whirl! If you do please come back and let me know how it goes for you.
And if you do have some Borax leftover- here are three project ideas:
Make Slime (in any color you like)
Make Flubber! (I love this stuff- soooo fun to play with!)
shirley elizabeth says
Love this idea for all sorts of holidays!