Monday 1 September 2014

A sugary project! With a not so sweet ending..

We decided to make rock candy. We might have stumbled upon it while looking through pinterest for interesting rainy day projects.

The steps are quite simple, and require not much more than sugar, water and a few candy-sticks. The idea is to create a super saturated solution for sugar and then leave sticks coated with sugar in the syrup to let the sugar crystalize onto. Wikipedia has a more detailed explanation here

Bebu is quite the kitchen enthusiast when it comes to mixing, and stirring and anything involving colours so she had a good time doing all the set up steps except for the ones involving hot melted sugar.

Here's Bebu having fun coating the sticks with sugar, mixing food colour into cooled sugar syrup and with her 4 colour choices...  I had the glasses covered in cling wrap just to make sure that no dust got into the sugar syrup especially since it would take a week at least before we saw some crystal action.. Also left the glasses up on the second top row of our bookshelf away from some very curious little hands (or big!) that might inadvertently tip them over..







Like Peppa Pig says "Waiting is boring!".. For a couple of days Bebu was interested in checking on them and then kind of gave up since there wasn't much happening... The picture above has some crystals settled on the stick after day 4 or so.. It was working! Yay!

Day 6 involved the family getting busy in lots of festivities around Ganesh festival and we forgot all about our project perched up on our bookshelf. It turned out that what we had forgotten for just a day, the ants had discovered !

The persistent little guys had managed to enter one of the glasses despite my best effort to keep things out..A sugary death for a few ants..

While Hubs and I enthusiastically tried to capture close up pictures of the crystal formation, Bebu wanted to try her sugar stick. She finally decided that she didn't like rock candy because it involved dead ants.. Gingy seemed to enjoy hers quite a bit..

So there it was: a Sugary project with a not so sweet ending..

Whatever our next project turns out to be, it is definitely going to try and avoid harming any kind of life forms...




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