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Post by Neyjour on Feb 11, 2017 16:21:21 GMT
A few days ago I was searching for crystal terrain tuts and stumbled onto this vid: How to Make Borax CrystalsThis might be a really fun (and cheap!) source of crystals for terrain, and even decoration for smaller props and pieces. Instead of plunking the whole chunk down as one piece, I was thinking of tapping it with a hammer to break it up into smaller clusters and shards, that I could then arrange to my liking. But... I have no idea how strong they are, and if it would even work out like I'm hoping. Might end up shattering it into unusable dust... Has anyone tried this? EDIT: Oh! I just found this: Borax Crystal Terrain Part 1. Very cool! I didn't realize you could just stick the pipe cleaners in straight. I thought it had to be coiled. But I'm still curious about how well they can break into pieces. Would be great to be able to do a broken/shattered column. Crystal rubble... EDIT-2: Or... what about alum crystals? It looks like you can grow them on just about anything. Here's a tut for using a chicken egg (shell): DIY Crystal Egg Geode. Gives me ideas about sculpting two halves of a mini egg (with Amaco Air Dry Clay), seeding the alum on the inside of each half, and then painting the outer "shell" when it's done. So you'd have a cracked open monster/creature egg sitting in the nest, with crystals inside instead of goo. I'm also going to experiment with growing some on small pieces of fired (but unpainted) pottery, to attempt to get small/tiny clusters.
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Post by adamsouza on Feb 12, 2017 6:08:11 GMT
Someone brought this up on the Facebook group a couple months back. Evidently you can even use Salt.
Going to have to try this myself.
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Post by Neyjour on Feb 12, 2017 9:02:30 GMT
I've also been looking at the Epsom Salt crystals, but it seems they dry out, turn white, and start to flake after a few weeks. And apparently even sealers can't stop it from eventually happening. Such a shame. I've seen some really beautiful photos of them (with food colouring). In some pics they look really thin and spindly, which might make them easy to crush up and sprinkle like flocking around crystal clusters, rocks, etc. The other photos I've seen where they've turned white actually look really nice, and would be perfect for snowy terrain. But if it's all just going to eventually disintegrate... Here's the article I found: Crafting With Epsom Salts
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Post by Neyjour on Feb 13, 2017 9:48:20 GMT
I found some Alum granules at Walmart, in a tiny spice jar. More than enough to cover these shards, with plenty left over. But I forgot I needed more for the solution... I have a bag on order, so hopefully I'll have some more photos to share in a few days. But for now, here's the shattered ceramic bowl with alum coated on the top of each shard: I'm thinking of splitting these up into multiple jars and pulling them out at different times, to test what they look like at different growth stages. If this works out well, I'm thinking the next experiment will be to sculpt some small terrain mounds out of air dry clay and polymer clay, and seeding only select portions of them with the alum. Maybe even do it in multiple stages... let one part grow for the full length of time, pull it out and let it dry, then seed another spot and let those grow for a shorter length of time. That way you could have different sized clusters on the same piece.
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Post by Neyjour on Feb 17, 2017 15:48:27 GMT
The alum crystals were a big flop. Nothing grew! And all the crystals I had seeded just crumbled off the pottery shards, as though the glue had dissolved. (It seems a bit odd that you're supposed to use PVA glue for something that's going to be submerged in liquid for many hours...) There's a few possibilities why it didn't work: 1- I used two different brands of alum. One for seeding the pottery shards and another for the solution. One (or both) of these brands might have just been a "dud". In one tutorial I watched, the person said nothing grew, so she switched to a different brand and it was a success. Unfortunately, she didn't say which brands she had used... 2- My water might not have been hot enough. The tutorial just says "very hot water", so I used hot water from the tap. It seemed like most of the alum dissolved (it's very difficult to see because of the food colouring) while I was stirring, but when I actually poured the solution into the jars, there was a lot that hadn't dissolved. If you need boiling water, I'd think they would specifically say "use boiling water", so maybe it has to be somewhere in between hot tap water and boiling water? 3- Maybe there are only specific types of surfaces/materials you can use for seeding the crystals? I'm going to try again, this time using the same brand of alum for both the seeding and the solution. I'm also going to boil the water, and then let it cool down a bit to a temp that's not quite boiling, but still much hotter than tap water. And I'm going to use a chicken egg shell. If that works, then I can rule out the possibility that my brand of alum is a dud, and then experiment further with other things to seed the crystals onto (the pottery shards again, air dry clay, etc.)
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Post by margaret on Feb 17, 2017 20:25:58 GMT
There's a detailed article on growing alum crystals at www.raci.org.au/document/item/249The article recommends a temperature of 60 degrees Celsius = 140 degrees Fahrenheit. That temperature is considered scalding and home hot water heaters are supposed to be set to 120 or less, not 140. So you probably need to warm up your hot tap water a bit. But 140 is still well below boiling. A higher temperature than 140 probably wouldn't hurt - it would allow more alum to dissolve into solution and be ready to precipitate out as crystals.
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sotf
Advice Guru
Posts: 1,084
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Post by sotf on Feb 17, 2017 20:31:24 GMT
Part of the reason they didn't grow that well is that you've got something that isn't going to focus the growth. It'll grow on anything there, a glass container would be what you want to use for it.
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Post by Neyjour on Feb 17, 2017 20:31:53 GMT
margaret - Thanks very much for the info/link! Hopefully the water temp is the reason why it didn't work. I really don't want to buy more alum... sotf - The pan is just what I was keeping them in, while the glue dried and I waited for my alum order to arrive. For the actual growing, I did it in glass jars, with a piece of paper towel over the tops.
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Post by Neyjour on Feb 20, 2017 15:41:17 GMT
Well, another failure... This time I used water that was just below boiling and the alum completely dissolved with a few stirs. (I stirred before I added the food colouring, so I could see everything clearly). But again, nothing actually grew. I ended up with a pile of alum "slush" that settled over the egg shell, and all over the bottom of the jar. And all the granules I had seeded onto the shell just crumbled right off. Might try once more with a different brand, but probably not for a while. I already spent quite a bit of money on crafting supplies, and don't want to buy another batch of alum right now. For anyone else that might be interested in trying this, these are the brands I used: 1st experiment: McComick Alum for the seeding, and JACQUARD Alum for the solution. 2nd experiment: JACQUARD Alum for both seeding and solution. I didn't do a test with the McCormick Alum for both seeding and solution because I didn't have enough. It's just a tiny little 1.9 oz jar.
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Post by sgtslag on Feb 20, 2017 17:10:59 GMT
Many crystal structures tend to be delicate. I've never heard of anyone using actual crystals for terrain. I had high hopes, however. Cheers!
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Post by Neyjour on Feb 21, 2017 19:37:15 GMT
sgtslag - Same here... I was really excited about the possibilities of what could be done with the Alum crystals. Ah well, I'm not throwing in the towel on them just yet. But in the meantime, I may experiment a bit with the Borax crystals. The ones in the video I linked in my initial post looked really cool.
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