Borax Snowflake

I did it. I did it yesterday. Yesterday in the late morning, right after I poured the Orange-Chocolate Truffle Fudge into its pan to set. I brought out those white pipe cleaners, the borax, some string, two pencils and two wide-mouth jars. Actually, just one wide-mouth jar; I wasn't paying attention to detail (so like me!) and brought out a quart-jar, but not one with a wide mouth. That little detail wasn't very important until the end, and I'll explain why later.

I saw the borax-snowflake idea on a blog, as mentioned in a previous post, and wanted to have a Crafternoon (thanks, Lindsay, for the new word) and had put it off.

Until yesterday.

The thought, for some reason, didn't occur to me to take my prenatal vitamins off the sill for the pictures. So you'll be seeing my prenatal vitamin brand of choice in most of the pictures of this post.

You start out with making the pipe cleaners into a skeleton frame of a snowflake, connecting pipe-cleaner ends with string, then bringing the string up to hang from a pencil at the top of the jar. Easy, right? Yes. It is. It is easy.

The pipe-cleaner snowflakes dangle in a solution of 3 tablespoons of borax per 1 cup of boiling water that has been stirred together prior to putting in the snowflake. You want enough water to cover the snowflake. I used 3 cups of water, so 9 tablespoons of borax. Easy. It is. It is easy.
The above picture doesn't show the crystals starting to form very well. But they are. They are forming. They are forming crystals.

The next two pictures show them forming very well. I believe it is about four hours into the process. Once it gets started, the crystal forming seems exponential.

From above. Obviously. Don't you love superfluous explanations of what you're looking at? Though I suppose I could explain that in this picture you see the string taped to the pencil. I did this because my snowflake was too low and I didn't feel like taking it out of the jar, especially since it had become hard, to tie the string a little higher. So I just rolled the string around once and taped it. Easy. It was. It was easy.

The snowflakes in their watery glory.

Not only do you need to make the snowflake small enough to fit into the jar, but also take into consideration that crystals will be growing onto the snowflake. The crystals are hard. The whole snowflake, once bendy, is hard and not...bendy. You have to take it out of the jar. (Dur.) Because one of my jars wasn't wide-mouth, I had to bend (by force) one of the snowflakes to coerce it out. It came out. Yes, it did. But not without force. And a few crystals coming off. So just keep that in mind now.

Look how pretty.

How does it work, you ask?

Well I don't know.

I ask the same question.

I assume it is some chemical reaction with the wire; but I don't know. Maybe it is that the crystals form as the water cools and need something to adhere to. Does anybody out there reading know the answer? I suppose I could "google it" and find out right now, but I'd rather throw the question out into the void of the internet, hoping to get an answer back.

I keep wondering what else I can crystallize. It is a bit like glittering: once you do one project and see how easy it is, and how gratifying it is to make something beautiful and sparkly, you wonder what else (at least I do) you can glitter. Well, what else can I dip into borax? That is my question. And how does it work?, too... that is my other question.