Crystal Flowers

A few weeks ago I was itching to put out springtime decor and wanted to do a project with my oldest. Well, one thing lead to another and we ended up with these beautiful borax crystal flowers. They are gorgeous and so incredibly easy to make!

The first thing you will want to figure out is a container to put your flower and borax solution in. The flower should be able to suspend in the container without touching any of the sides or bottom and easily removed without touching the rim. I used an old Tupperware container. Then you will need to devise a method for suspending the flower. I used a fairly large rose so my container was quite large. I ended up tying the stem to a pencil and then resting the pencil on the edges of the container. You will need to do a bit of engineering for the items you have to work with.

Borax can be very toxic so please use caution while doing this activity with kiddos. You will not want them to touch the flower until it’s fully dry. It took about two hours for the flower to reach the crystallized consistency that we liked; the longer it sits in the solution the bigger your crystals will get. Enjoy your masterpiece in a pretty vase for everyone to see!

Materials:

• Artificial flower
• Borax
• Water
• Container
• Pencil, popsicle stick or straw
• String

Method:

1. Put water to boil and remove leaves from the stem of flower.
2. Pour boiling water into container and measure out 3 tablespoons of borax per cup of boiling water.
3. Stir in borax until dissolved.
4. Suspend flower in solution so it doesn’t touch any of the sides or the bottom of the container.
5. Allow flower to soak until desired crystal thickness has occurred (minimum of two hours, maximum of 24.
6. Remove flower from borax solution and allow to dry.
7. Enjoy!