Make beautiful crystal sun-catchers that hang in your window and split sunlight into rainbows! This experiment combines art and science.
What You’ll Need
🍶 Glass jar with lid (or pot)
💎 Borax (find in laundry aisle)
🧶 Pipe cleaners (various colors)
🧵 String or fishing line
🔥 Boiling water (with adult help!)
🥄 Spoon
How to Make Them
1. Bend a pipe cleaner into a shape — star, heart, snowflake, butterfly, anything you want!
2. Tie a piece of string to one part of your shape — this is how you’ll hang it.
3. With an adult’s help, fill the jar with boiling water.
4. Add 3 tablespoons of borax for every cup of water. Stir until dissolved.
5. Hang your pipe cleaner shape inside the jar so it’s fully submerged but not touching the sides.
6. Use a pencil across the top of the jar to hold the string in place.
7. Leave it for 24 hours.
8. Come back — your shape is covered in sparkling crystals! 💎✨
9. Carefully lift it out, let it dry, then hang in a sunny window.
How Crystals Form
Hot water can hold MORE borax dissolved in it than cool water. When you saturate the hot water with borax and then let it cool, the water can’t hold all the borax anymore.
The extra borax has to come out of the water — and it does so by forming organized crystal patterns. Each crystal has a specific shape determined by its chemistry.
When the crystal grows on your pipe cleaner, it ‘sticks’ to the shape — covering it in beautiful sparkles!
The Rainbow Effect
Crystals break sunlight into all its colors — just like a prism! When sunlight passes through a borax crystal, it bends, separating into red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.
Hang several sun-catchers in a sunny window for maximum sparkle!
Other Crystal Experiments
🧂 Salt crystals: Use Epsom salt (similar method)
🍬 Sugar crystals (rock candy): Eat your science!
🧊 Quick crystals: Mix water + alum from spice aisle
❄️ Frost designs: Tape paper outside on a freezing night
Math + chemistry + art = sparkle 🌟
