Grow Crystals for Jewelry!

A little while back, we heard about growing your own crystals.... To use in jewelry! So, we decided try our hand at it. And we think it was a success! Take a look!

1. First, we started with a cup of water. We added about 1 1/2 cups of water to our glass. You will want your alum salt on hand.

2. Next, we added the salt to the water. We actually had two cups. In one, we added 3/4 the little container of alum salt. In the second glass, we added 1 1/4 containers of alum salt. Stir it in VERY well. Now, set it aside for 10- 14 days. You can check in on it and you will see crystals start to grown after the first day or two! 

3. Once you see a good amount of crystals that have grown, you can move forward.

4. Now it's time to dump the water out.  

5. Now, you will want to remove the crystals. We used a butter knife and gently pried the chunks of crystals out. This is what they looked like.

6. Now is the fun part! Time to make jewelry! Just to experiment, we colored a few chunks with different colors of nail polish. 

 Then we moved to make things!

So, for the rings shown above, we tried a couple things. For the blue and purple rings, we colored the crystals with food coloring. With the blue ring, we colored the crystals first, then added to the ring. We used our E6000 glue. Once in place, we painted all crystals with clear nail polish to seal them.

For the purple ring, we glued the non colored crystals into e ring tray first, then painted on the food coloring. Once dry, we sealed with clear nail polish.

And for the peach colored ring, we glued in he non colored crystals, then painted with nail polish. That's how we got the color on the crystals. It was the color of the polish we used.

Next, we tried necklaces.

Here, we took a chunk of the crystals and painted with colored nail polish. We did one side, let dry, then the next. This was repeated for about 4 layers of polish to be sure the crystals would not break apart. We then gave the entire crystal pendant a coat of clear nail polish. Once dry, we glued on a necklace bail. And the pendant was complete!

We also added the crystals to our pendant trays. With these, we glued the crystals in first, then painted with many layers of nail polish. 

With this necklace, we added the crystals into the pendant first, then painted with food coloring. Once again, we sealed with a couple layers of clear nail polish. 

We also decided to add a few of our colored crystals and uncolored crystals to one of our glass globe pendants. 

Hope you enjoyed! Jewelry supplies we used are sold in our shops:
Www.WillowRunCrafts.com    and     Www.Etsy.com/shop/WillowRunCrafts