Crafty Science Experiment – Crystal Snowflakes

Winter has been around for a while, and M recently decided he needed something other than leaves hanging in front of his bedroom window (maybe I was in denial about the whole winter thing?).

I’ve seen this little project everywhere, so I’m sure it is new to no one except us.  I don’t know why we didn’t get around to doing it sooner.

It’s all about saturated solutions.  We used the following items:Borax, 5 pipecleaners, 2 dowels, food coloring, 5 glasses, measuring spoons, and a kettle for boiling the water.

First, boil some water.  We had a full kettle and used almost all of it to make 5 snowflakes.

While your water is boiling, form the pipecleaners into snowflakes.  We cut each snowflake into 3 sections, leaving one longer than the others (for hanging), and twisted them together in the middle, then pulled apart the six points of the snowflake.  Twist the long end around one of the dowels, then hang in a glass.  Make sure your snowflake is not touching the sides of the glass:
Next, I poured the boiling water into each glass, and M began measuring tablespoons of borax into them. (Note – borax can be harmful if swallowed, so make sure your child is able to do this without deciding to take a taste!).  He stirred until the borax dissolved, then added more until there was a bit that wouldn’t dissolve, making a saturated solution – yay! :)  I think it took about 3 tablespoons of borax for every cup or so of water.  We weren’t too exact, to be honest. ;)


We decided a little color would be nice, so M stirred in a bit of food coloring.  We added in a quick color-mixing review, and made one of them purple by using blue and red together.
Then we let all the little snowflakes hang out over night:
They stayed in their solution for about 18 hours total.  The following day, the glasses looked like this: Isn’t it beautiful?  I think it would be really neat to do this to a glass jar to make a pretty votive holder.  I hated washing all those pretty crystals off, but decided we do need drinking glasses after all.
The snowflakes turned out great!  Here are some of them:

We let them dry on a paper towel, then moved them all to a clean dowel rod and hung them in front of the window:

You can also do this with sugar or salt.  The main thing is making sure your water is saturated with whatever it is you are using.  If you use sugar, use a string instead of a pipe cleaner, and make rock candy!  (You could use a pipecleaner, but I’m thinking about the fuzz getting in my mouth – bleck!)

I’m linking this up to   Be sure to check it out!

Have a beautiful day! :)