It’s been getting colder and colder…this might have something to do with the fact that it’s winter…anyway, we thought we’d make some winter craft. And what is more wintry than a snowflake?
We made ours using borax and pipe cleaners using the instructions found here. What you need to do is to twist some pipe cleaners to form a snowflake shape and then tie a string to one point of the snowflake, this is then attached to a pencil and hung in a jar. The jar is first filled with boiling water and borax (3 tablespoons of borax per cup of water) which is mixed until all borax is dissolved, add food colouring if you want. Then lower your snowflake shape into the jar and let the borax do its thing! Let this sit overnight and you should be left with a pretty snowflake. I say “should” because our first attempt didn’t result in a snowflake, just some wet pipe cleaners. The problem may have been the pipe cleaners we used:
This was actually the photo I took after they’d been in the solution overnight. See what I mean?
sure, they were pretty, but the borax slid right off them because they were glossy (at least that’s what I think the problem was), it might also have been that some small child was moving the jars. So the borax solution ended up being used as a toilet cleaner – not necessarily a bad thing – it does say on the pack that it can be used as a toilet cleaner. Interestingly, no mention of snowflakes on the pack!
Okay, attempt two with new pipe cleaners – the fluffy kind:
We prepared our borax solution and snowflakes and hung them and went off and enjoyed a rather yummy breakfast at a local café.
Fast forward a little over one hour later and we return home to find this:
aaaaghhhh!!! This was not what we wanted to see. Thankfully, it didn’t get any worse. The good news was that the borax was starting to attach itself to the pipe cleaners.
The next morning we had borax crystals attached to our pipe cleaners – still not great, though.
Here we go again…attempt number three:
This time we made them to look like these Martha Stewart ones and we added a lot more borax.
Someone got a little carried away with the blue food colouring!
Finally, we have snowflakes!!
Linking to:
Tags: borax, borax crystal snowflakes, borax crystals, borax snowflake, craft, crystal snowflake, Homeschool, Homeschooling, pipe cleaners, pipecleaners, science, snowflake, winter
