Crystal Garden
Dissolve borax or salt in hot water and grow sparkling crystals on a string overnight.
Start building ↓The build
Make the solution
Stir solute into hot water until no more dissolves.
Hang a seed
Suspend a pipe-cleaner shape from a pencil into the jar.
Let it cool
Set it somewhere undisturbed.
Harvest
Crystals build up over hours; lift out and dry.
Hot water holds more dissolved solute; as it cools, the excess can no longer stay dissolved and locks onto the seed as ordered crystals.
A closer look
Slow cooling of a supersaturated solution lets atoms arrange into a repeating lattice — the basis of all crystals.
Variables to test
- 1 Cool fast vs slow — how does crystal size differ?
- 2 Try salt vs sugar vs borax for shape.
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