Crystal Egg Geodes

On Sunday me and the kids wanted to do more of a science project than a craft, we came across THIS from MarthaStewart.com and decided that it looked really neat.

(please note the picture below is the one from the martha stewart website)

Aren't they pretty? Ours did not turn out looking like this and I know exactly why. We did not use enough Alum powder. It is very expensive to buy. A small container here cost $5 and we would have needed four containers to do this project. However we thought that maybe we would get some results with one container.

We gathered all of our supplies

And discovered that blowing out eggs is actually kind of fun and not too messy if you do it over the kitchen sink. Cutting the egg shell in half without it cracking was the hard part. We followed the instructions, and then waited, waited and waited. While waiting we actually researched geodes to find out how they form in nature.

Finally our results.... While we didn't have the nice crystals like in the picture above you can see in the bottom of the egg shell where some crystals were starting to form. If I ever come across alum in bulk or on sale (in theory I don't see why it isn't on sale now, it is the start of canning season here after all) we will try this again to see if we get different results.

Melted Crayon Art and glow in the dark bubbles

Today me and the kids decided that we needed a new craft project so we looked on pinterest and saw some neat pictures done with melted crayons.

Our supplies:
2 large canvases from the dollar store ($1.25 each)
2 boxes of Crayola Crayons from the dollar store ($1.00 each)
a blow dryer
newspaper to put under the canvases
and some black acrylic paint.

We started of by placing the crayons on the canvases then taping them down so they wouldn't slide off then went outside to melt them. We discovered that +45celsius weather before the high humidity means that the crayons don't just melt... within seconds of the the heat outside combined with the blowdryer the crayons liquified. I don't think that all of the melted crayon wax will ever come off of the driveway lol.

The end results were not perfect but the kids are happy and have them hanging in their room.

Once it got dark out we decided to try and make glow in the dark bubbles. This was a complete failure. We made green and blue glowing bubble water, we started off with store bought bubbles and added a bit of liquid dishsoap to make bigger bubbles. The next step was to cut open glow sticks and add it to the bubble solution. This was a complete disaster!! My kitchen glowed blue for a long time, I had to wipe it up with all the lights out so that I could see where all of the glow stick liquid landed when one exploded.

The bubble solution glowed nicely long enough to take a picture but in the three minutes that it took to take a picture, get shoes on and go outside, the glow was already gone. On the plus side the bubbles were huge :)

My lesson learned for the day... read reviews posted on blogs etc... before doing projects like this. Had I read beyond the instructions I would have found a lot of posts saying that this didn't actually work. Or better yet... check pinstrosity.com LOL.