“Overnight?” she whispered.
“Well,” said Mr. Hamada, “some take a few hours. Some take weeks. But the prettiest ones? They take a little patience.”
“Now what?” Mom asked.
There. On the paper clip. On the string. Tiny, sharp, glittering points—like frost on a winter branch. Crystals. Dozens of them. They caught the moonlight and threw back tiny rainbows.
Next came the string. She tied one end to the middle of the pencil, and the other end to the paper clip—a tiny anchor. Then she lowered the paper clip into the jar and balanced the pencil across the rim. The string hung straight down into the clear, hot liquid. crystal growing diy
And from then on, when someone told Lena to be patient, she didn’t roll her eyes. She just smiled and thought of the crystals growing in the dark. You’ll need: borax, boiling water, a jar, a string, a pencil, and a paper clip. Dissolve borax in hot water until no more dissolves. Suspend the string in the solution. Wait overnight. Wake up to magic.
She boiled water on the stove (with Mom watching carefully) and poured it into the jar. Then she stirred in spoonful after spoonful of borax until the water could take no more—a supersaturated solution, she learned to call it. At the bottom of the jar, a few white grains refused to dissolve, like sleepy snow at the bottom of a lake. “Overnight
“Now we wait,” Lena said, though the word tasted sour in her mouth.