DIY Borax Crystal Ornaments

 

This is such a fun and easy project that sneaks a bit of STEM into holiday crafting.

A few days ago, Will and I were in the mood to do a quick Christmas craft. We'd just cleaned the house for guests, so I didn't want to drag out a ton of crafting supplies, and we were already busy, so I didn't want to start something time-consuming and fussy.

Our solution: borax crystal ornaments!

The hands-on time commitment for these ornaments is just a few minutes, although be aware that the crystals will need to be left alone to grow for several hours, and preferably overnight. However, if you've got a countertop or table that doesn't get bumped every five minutes like my countertops and tables do, ahem, you can start this project in the morning and then check back in on it throughout the day to marvel at your crystal's growth!

To make your own lovely borax crystal ornaments, you will need:

• borax. I use this sometimes as a laundry booster, so I have it on hand with my cleaning supplies. If you don't already own it, research its cleaning properties and you might find that you'll be happy to have it on hand, too!
• pipe cleaners. I also have these on hand, although now that the kids are not so much kids anymore (sob), I suppose the time is coming that I'll have used up my last pipe cleaner and will have no need to buy more. Okay, that just got real sad...
• popsicle stick and thread. You don't need to use these specific materials, just something that you can tie to the pipe cleaner and something that you can rest on top of the container. 
• container. To avoid having to rinse a crust of borax crystals out of a jar, I cut the top off of some of the one-liter flavored sparkling waters that Syd and I are unfortunately obsessed with. Such wasteful packaging! Such delicious water!
• water and spoon.
• measuring cups. You'll need one-cup and a quarter-cup measuring cups.

And here's how to make your borax crystal ornaments!

1. Bend a pipe cleaner into a fun ornament shape. It needs to be small enough that it won't touch the sides or bottom of the container that will hold it, but otherwise you can create any shape that you like. The liter bottles that Will and I used were on the narrow side of the spectrum, so after some trial and error Will eventually hit on a spiral design that fit perfectly with plenty of room to spare AND looks utterly magical when crystalized!

You can crystalize two or three ornaments at once with the borax solution we use, and with Will's design we were able to do two spirals per container.

When you've got a design that you like, tie your thread to it, leaving plenty of length to wrap around the popsicle stick later.

2. Put water to boil, and while you're waiting, measure out 1/4 cup of borax and pour it into the bottom of the container you'll be using to grow your borax crystal ornaments.

When the water boils, measure out two cups and pour it into the container, then stir the borax well to create a saturated solution. The boiling water shrunk our plastic bottles a bit, but fortunately they remained usable.

3. When the solution is still, drop the ornament into the container and adjust the depth at which it sits by wrapping the string around the popsicle stick. The ornament shouldn't touch the sides or bottom of the container, and should be fully submerged. You can pour more hot water into the container to submerge the ornament, if needed, because this solution already has WAY more borax than required.

And don't forget that if there's room in your container, you can crystallize multiple ornaments at once!

4. Leave the ornaments alone to crystallize. Over the course of a few hours, they'll go from looking like this--

--to looking like this:

5. After about 24 hours-ish, remove the ornaments and let them air dry on a clean towel.

When they're completely dry, knot the string into a loop and hang them on the tree!

I don't know if these ornaments will last from year to year, but I do plan to store them and see. They're definitely much sturdier than the washing soda crystals that Will and I also tried; those didn't cover the pipe cleaner very well, and they started getting crumbly just a few days later:

Washing soda crystals look interesting through a microscope, but they don't make good ornaments.

If you want to turn this into a whole homeschool unit study (here's the very fun crystals unit study we did a few years ago!), here are some ideas:

• Make those washing soda crystals, and whatever other easy crystal recipes you can find. Compare and contrast!
• Try crystallizing objects other than pipe cleaners. Will and I did this, and we found that shells worked okay and wood worked less okay and was a pain in the butt to make sink. Give a kid enough containers, and I'm sure they could have all kinds of fun scrounging around the house and yard for objects to try!
• Look at the finished crystals through a microscope. My kids LOVED this kid-friendly USB microscope when they were younger. 
• Model crystal shapes. These models are more challenging (click on the broken image to be taken to the pdf model), while these are simpler. Copy them onto pretty cardstock, or draw your own decorations, and they'd also make lovely ornaments!
• Read about crystals. These are some of the books about crystals that my kids enjoyed when they were younger:

If you need to sneak in a media component to get your kids interested, Frozen and The Dark Crystal have fun crystal references, although The Dark Crystal will also scare the snot out of your younger kids. 

When in Michigan, You Must Search for Petoskey Stones

 

But first, doughnuts!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by JF (@craft_knife)

The kids and I walked to Mackinaw Bakery from our hotel, on the way playing the very important game of Whose Beautiful Beach House Would Each of Us Settle For/Let's Criticize Million-Dollar Real Estate While We Pretend Like Our Own Actual House Isn't Literal Garbage. Syd's favorite house is apparently worth 1.3 million dollars, while Will's is upwards of $750,000. I can't seem to shake my trash taste, however, because the house I want is only worth $300,000. It had a nice view, though, and I can always pop over to Syd's mansion whenever I feel like an evening of luxury!

Following Google Map's walking directions instead of driving directions must have thrown us off a little, because somehow, loudly chatting away to each other like huge tourists, we all managed to walk into... the back door of the bakery, I guess? We just walked straight into... a room, clearly a restaurant with tables and chairs and people sitting at those tables and chairs and chatting quietly not like huge tourists, but there was no signage, no hostess or waitstaff, no kitchen or counter. Just people. In a room.

I stopped and tried to get my bearings, the kids bumped into my back and peered around me but had no insights to offer, and we essentially just stood there, blinking in confusion and mild distress until somebody took pity on us and called out that the bakery was around the corner. And indeed, there was a doorway at the back of the room, and it did turn out to lead into a lovely, large bakery, with picture windows showing the parking area outside (oops!), and a million delightful doughnuts and breakfast sandwiches and coffee drinks to choose from.

Hallelujah for the apple fritters, the likes of which I have not seen since I lived in Texas 26 years ago! 

Considering the fact that we all dithered over the doughnut selection, and placed an inconveniently large order that included doughnuts and breakfast sandwiches and drinks both hot and cold, and I spilled some of my iced latte on the floor trying to get the straw in, and Will ordered a peach and mango smoothie and the guy at the counter said they were out of peaches so she ordered a mango smoothie but they were out of mangos, too, I'm pretty sure we were posthumously given the Worst Customers of the Day award, but eventually we emerged unscathed through the front doors, walked back to the hotel, and enjoyed one more breakfast with a beautiful view of the Straits of Mackinac.

Through our hotel window, I mean. Ain't nobody eating breakfast outside with a swarm of midges.

 After breakfast, we packed up and hit the M-119 for the scenic drive along the coast and through the Tunnel of Trees to Petoskey.

The kids were unimpressed by the Tunnel of Trees, but trying to impress a teenager is a sucker's game at the best of times.

Syd was also extremely unimpressed by Petoskey, but to be fair, Petoskey held some of her least-favorite things, including a sky full of sun, a beach full of rocks, absolutely no wi-fi, but lots and lots and LOTS of spiders.

Welcome to Spider Beach: Part Two!

Will and I, on the other hand, were in absolute hog heaven at Sunset Park. We immediately settled in and commenced our search for Petoskey stones.

I felt like I'd done plenty of research on how and where to find Petoskey stones. I know that when they're dry, they resemble limestone (which the kids and I are WELL familiar with!). I know that when they're wet, you can see the corral pattern. 

What I did not know, though, was how easily I'd confuse them with Charlevoix stones. The first few Charlevoix stones I found, I could sort of tell that they weren't quite what I was looking for. The more Charlevoix stones we found, though, the more I convinced myself that surely these must be what I wanted, because they were what we kept finding!

Good thing Charlevoix stones are also really cool, because we ended up with dozens of them--

--and, as far as I can tell before we tumble them all, no Petoskey stones. I am SO BUMMED!

But here's the landscape that we were working with:

So challenging! I wet a ton of stones, and spent a lot of time wading, as well, but never found anything other than horn corrals, brachiopods, and Charlevoix stones:

What I'd really have liked would have been to visit several different sites. I've been told that hiking away down the beach helps, too, as the area gets less picked over the further you go from more heavily trafficked areas. Will would have been totally down for spending the entire day rockhounding with me, but Syd had already spent most of her time at Spider Beach: Part Two curled up under her hoodie on the rocks, desperately trying to tune out her urge to murder me in my sleep by listening to her music, only getting up every now and then to shake off the spiders and settle herself again even more miserably. I almost managed to convince myself that she could just wait in the car while Will and I kept rockhounding, but I really do want her to still talk to me when she's all grown up, so sadly, we admitted defeat in our Petoskey stone hunt and drove on to Traverse City.

I didn't really want to stay in Traverse City, but it was the only place within driving distance of Sleeping Bear Dunes that I could find us a place to sleep that was only 200% of my budget for accomodations on that leg of the trip. Ahem. I also don't really ever want to go BACK to Traverse City, if for no other reason than that the traffic was terrible, but somehow the kids and I managed to fight every red light and confusing turn lane and left turn into cross traffic and unannounced street closing to get back and forth to the grocery store (where score, they stocked Traverse City Whiskey Co. American Cherry, so that's Matt's souvenir all sorted!), so that later we could do this:

Our very wee cottage was just steps from the beach, and included all the tools that we needed to cook hot dogs over the fire. 

Roasted hot dogs tasted SO GOOD after three days of peanut butter and jelly!

Extendable roasting sticks is such a smart idea, and I want a set of my own!

I sampled some of Matt's whiskey, Will drank some of the juice I bought us because I was starting to worry about scurvy, and we read the sun down on our beach:

I'm SO glad we had our beach cookout, even though we were all tired, because the next day I walked out with my coffee and book and peanut butter toast, planning a leisurely little brekkie by the water before gearing up for Sleeping Bear... and the beach was absolutely covered with dead alewives.

And that's why we ate frozen pizza for dinner that night and microwaved hot dogs for the next day's breakfast!

Day 1: Presque Isle Lighthouses

Day 2: Mackinac Island

On the Peninsula Trail

 

Here in the Midwest, we're currently wavering between Winter, Part Three and Practice Spring, with temperatures varying anywhere from 35 to 65 depending on the day. 

So one day last week, when the forecast bafflingly called for clear skies and a high in the upper 60s, I declared it Homeschool Field Trip Day. We left our bathroom work crew to go about their day without having to step over or around us every ten minutes and drove out to a spot I've been wanting to visit for years. It's a nature preserve adjacent to million-dollar houses on the shore of one of our nearby lakes, a narrow peninsula that leads a mile straight out, water on both sides of the ridge that you walk along. The parking lot is deliberately pretty small to limit visitors, so despite its beauty it's quiet and fairly unpopulated.

It was the perfect place to spend the day.

It was made clear to me that I apparently spent the entire winter hibernating, because I did not have ANY wind for the unexpectedly steep elevation changes we encountered. I spent most of the hike gasping for air and vowing to get my cardio back on track when, you know, the days are a little more reliably not 40 degrees and raining.

Luna got a little winded, too. 

Good thing the view was so beautiful! Gazing out at the scenery is a great excuse to stop and make sure you're not dying right that second.

My greatest happiness is that my teenagers still bring me awesome rocks to look at.

We have some geology studies that we're VERY low-key working on, so during this field trip I forced the kids to each find three interesting geological things to sketch. 

Will sketched a bluff, and then it was back on our feet for the final leg of our trek!

The trail ended on a dirt beach, with water on three sides and the far lakeshore visible in the distance.

I brought a picnic (that, plus the extra water, hardback book, travel watercolor kit with even more water, and camera might have explained a little bit of my hiking woes...) for us to share, and then I might have had a wee nap while the kids played with Luna, finished their sketches, and also sat quietly to enjoy the day. 

The lake level was very high, I think, so I'll be curious to come back one day in the summer and see what this beach looks like then.

Not gonna lie--the hike back was even tougher!

Will finally took my backpack and gave me Luna, who stopped often enough to sniff stuff that I could save a little face with my rest breaks, and who could generally be relied upon to tow me at least partway up every incline. 

It was a brilliant day, the kind of very early spring adventure that reminds you that yes, pleasant weather IS coming, and full days exploring outdoors will soon be the rule rather than the exception. I think this little hit of Vitamin D will get us through Winter's Last Gasp and into Spring, For Real!