Easter Borax Crystals

I recently saw a post featuring Easter Borax Crystals at Housing a Forest.  We bought a box of Borax just a few weeks ago to make bouncy balls, and I knew C and R would both love making crystals so we gave it a try.

First, we made chick and Easter egg shapes out of pipe cleaners.  C and I did most of the work on this; it was tricky for R, but she tried to help a little.

Then, we tied string around each pipe cleaner shape and then tied the string around a bamboo skewer.  Every set of directions I read, recommended putting each shape in it's own container with about 3 cups of boiling water and 1/2 cup of Borax.  I didn't have enough individual containers to put each shape in alone so we filled a plastic beach pail with boiling water and Borax.  I used 1/2 a cup of Borax for every 3 cups of boiling water. 

You need enough water to submerge the pipe cleaner shapes if you want crystals to form around the entire shape.  Our beach pail was not big enough for this, so we could not submerge the very top of our shapes.  It is important that the pipe cleaners not touch the sides or bottom of the container, or the crystals will attach to the container and it will be difficult to remove the shapes.  We put the pipe cleaner shapes in the Borax solution before dinner time and I was concerned that the beach pail method wasn't going to work because there were no crystals when I went to bed. 

Needless to say, we were all very happy to wake up and find crystals this morning!  As you can see, the tops of our shapes (the part that was not submerged in the Borax solution) do not have crystals.  This actually became a great opportunity to discuss how the crystals form and the reason why the crystals did not form at the top of the shapes. 

When the sun shines through, the decorations will look very pretty and sparkly hanging in our windows!

I am linking this to Science Sunday at Adventures in Mommydom.  You can find great science projects for kids over there every Sunday.