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You can make beautiful sparkling valentine hearts using pipe cleaners and Borax.
You will need:
• Borax Laundry powder (from a chemist)
• Pipe cleaners
• Heavy jar, with a wide neck
• String
• Pencil
• Marker pen
• A glass
• Red food colour (about _ small bottle)
What to do:
01. Shape a pipe cleaner into a heart shape02. Suspend the heart from a pencil and hang it in the heavy jar.
03. Mark the jar to indicate where the top of the heart is.
04. Remove the heart and fill the jar with hot water up to the mark.
05. Add 1/3 glass of borax powder and stir until it is all dissolved, (The water needs to be just off boiling temperature, and borax is a mild irritant – so take care!) you can add red food colour at this point too which will make the heart grow pink crystals.
06. Suspend the heart in the solution making sure the pipe cleaner is completely immersed in the solution and isn't touching the sides or bottom of the container.
07. As the solution cools, the crystals will begin to form on your pipe cleaner.
08. Leave overnight. Remove from the solution and allow to dry.
Variations:
Overnight soaking will give you very thickly crystallized ornaments. If you want some of the colour of the pipe cleaner to show through, leave in the solution for less time.
If you want, you can spray your finished ornament with acrylic sealer or clear spray paint to keep the crystals from falling off too quickly.
You’ll notice from the pictures that we made an arrow to go with the heart – you can make flower shapes, teddy bear shapes, anything, providing it’s not too fussy, will come out covered in crystals. If you think that one pipe cleaner makes too small a heart, join two together and use that.
The Science:
The borax powder dissolves in the warm water but as the water cools the molecules of borax crystallize out of the solution onto the pipe cleaner. If you look closely you can see their shapes.
In many solids the arrangements of the building blocks of the material (ion, atoms and molecules) can be a mixture of different structures. In crystals, however, a single type of collection of atoms is repeated over and over throughout the entire material. For an analogy, you can think of crystals as a big skyscraper, in which all the rooms are built to exactly the same design.
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