Borax Snowflakes

This pin test was originally posted on CraftFail.

I know it’s a little late to make this a Christmas decoration, but it’s still winter so I figure we can still try borax snowflakes.

As with many crafts of this calibre, it’s cuter if a kid does it. You’re stuck with me. Also, I swear the instructions didn’t say what color pipe cleaner to use, so I used what I had. Erm.

But I did manage to have, you know, the borax.

I was feeling all superior and stuff, too, because I did a test run to make sure it would all fit together properly.

While I was boiling water to pour on top of the borax, I thought I’d make myself some tea. If you do this, don’t mix up the cups.

Cuz, you know, one is tea and one is, like, poison. (This is not foreshadowing, by the way. I do like to employ certain literary methods, including foreshadowing, in my posts, but I will go ahead and put you out of your misery and tell you that I am not quite enough of an idiot to drink borax instead of tea by mistake. Sorry to disappoint.)

Then I set the pipe cleaner in the borax solution overnight.

Well, actually overnight plus a day because I forgot about it.

I have to say, I was rather unimpressed when I took it out. The original blog post led me to believe that the borax crystals would be highly visible and at least a little awesome. Lo, they were not. I mean, you could sorta see them, but mostly it was just a wet brown pipe cleaner snowflake, and that’s not really all that impressive.

So: don’t use brown, don’t drink the borax, and don’t expect a beautiful miracle of snowflake magic. To be fair, it did look a little more impressive once it dried, but I would have liked to know that you should also dry it hanging up so one side doesn’t get all squished and not-crystally. So do that. Or just skip this whole thing. That’s probably the better idea.

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