We used this in my daughter's science fair experiment for growing crystals. ...and it did a remarkably good job at that!
Alum is one of the easier crystals to grow, especially if your child wait until the last minute. A lot of crystals take 4-6 weeks. But with alum, you can get *something* within 1-2 weeks. The key is to get a good, supersaturated solution. i.e. boil that water, spoon the alum in, reheat the water if you have to, and keep going until the water can not dissolve any more alum. You will have seed crystals forming within hours. Pick out a good one, tie to some fishing line, and then hang it in the solution. Discard anything else that may be growing. You do not want it to compete with your seed. This is a bit of a rushed approach and you will probably not get the classic octahedron that you may see on the internet. But you will still get something that your child can learn from.
Attached below is what we grew. You will notice kind of a pinkish tint to ours. We had food coloring in our solution. We naively thought we might get something like a ruby. But what we learned is that the alum tends to stay with just itself and kick the food coloring out (for the most part). Even though it was very irregular, you can still see how it tried to form triangular shapes. Very, very cool!
Worked perfectly for making homemade geodes.
The alum worked well for growing crystals for my first graders Science Fair Project. The bag was large enough to allow us to make a few test geodes before beginning the science fair documentation.
How to: crack and wipe out eggshells, brush dried eggshell with school glue and dust inside of shell with alum powder. This creates the seed crystal base. Once completely dried, you can place the eggshell into a saturated solution of alum & water... food coloring drops add a nice touch. The crystals pictured took 48 hours to grow.
I got this to tan a deer hide. Alum is used in the tanning of animal hides to remove moisture, prevent rotting, and produce a type of leather. Traditionally treating hides with alum, instead of tannic acid, is called tawing and not tanning. The product is traditionally called parchment instead of leather.
Tanning hide into leather involves a process which permanently alters the protein structure of skin. Tanning can be performed with either vegetable or mineral methods. I prefer alum, it is easier to apply than the traditional method.. Before tanning, the skins are unhaired, degreased, desalted and soaked in water over a period of 6 hours to 4 days. I generally go for 4 days, you'll have a cleaner hide. Alum just gives a softer hide after everything is done. They're more like the blanket hides that you see in an old western.
This alum dissolves really well. It was a good price. It was really hard to find anywhere in local stores. I was glad Amazon had it so cheap and could get it to the house so fast.
STEP ONE
Skin the deer and bone out the tail. Scrape every particle of fat and flesh from the hide with a knife. Begin the tanning process or preserve it with a generous layer of non-iodized salt. Salted hides can be air dried until the onset of warm weather, or frozen.
STEP TWO
Soak the skin in water in a plastic garbage can until it softens, changing the water often. Drain, then pull the skin back and forth across the edge of a board. Scrape it with the back edge of a knife or an old hacksaw blade with dull teeth. Do not expose the hair roots.
STEP THREE
Dissolve 2 ½ pounds of salt in 4 gallons of water in the garbage can. In a plastic bucket, dissolve 1 pound of alum in a gallon of water. Slowly pour the alum solution into the garbage can, mixing thoroughly. Soak the skin for four days, occasionally stirring to make sure the hide is well coated. Rinse thoroughly with running water.
STEP FOUR
Tack the hide, hair side down, to a piece of plywood. Partially dry it in a sunless place, then rub in a coat of fat liquor oil (3 ½ ounces of neat's-foot oil combined with 3 ½ ounces of warm water and 1 ounce of ammonia). Work in half of this mixture, allow it to stand for an hour, then repeat. Cover with plastic overnight.
STEP FIVE
Remove the tacks, dampen the hide with a wet cloth, stretch it, then rub it back and forth over a sawhorse. Redampen it and repeat, applying additional fat liquor sparingly. When the hide is perfectly supple, smooth the surface by chafing it with fine-grit sandpaper.
I wasn't expecting this to work as well as it did. I bought it to make crystals in a jar- all I did was microwave some water, dissolve the salt, let some crystals grow at the bottom, tied the best looking crystal with some fishing line, redissolved the salt and let it grow on the hanging crystal. Redissolved every couple nights and within a week I have a big crystal.
Feature Product
- JACQUARD PRODUCTS-Alum
- Make your project a success with aluminum sulfate
- Alum is a powdered presoak used to treat fabric or for marbling
Description
JACQUARD PRODUCTS-Alum. Make your project a success with aluminum sulfate. Alum is a powdered presoak used to treat fabric or for marbling. It ensures that designs transfer clearly to fabric or paper surfaces. Alum is also used with some natural dyes as a mordant. This package contains one pound of aluminum sulfate. Made in USA.
I purchased the alum powder to make colorful geodes for Easter and the results were spectacular! This is a very easy and fun project to do at home and the results are very beautiful and dazzling. Just google the words "Martha Stewart" and "DIY Geodes" or type in "DIY Geodes" in YouTube for more details.
At first, I used the alum powder sold at my local grocery store (in the spices section). However I was not very happy with the results. The crystals that formed were very small and did not dazzle very much under the lights. It did not have that "wow" factor. Jacquard's alum powder produced superior results and is cheaper if you are planning on making multiple large geodes. The grocery store product was 1oz and cost me $2 vs. $8+ for 1lb (16oz) of Jacquard.
My recipe for making the geodes was as follows (Credit to YouTuber Ann Le (Anneorshine) for the Polymer Clay Idea):
Base: Make a polymer clay base by molding some Sculpy or Premo into the shape of a geode cup. You can mix different color to get a more marbelized look. Bake per package instructions. Once geode cups are cool, brush on some clear glue (I used Elmer's clear glue) and while the glue is still wet sprinkle in some glitter. The larger the pieces of glitter the larger the crystals that form. Dry overnight. After base is dry, brush off excess glitter that has not adhered.
If you do not have glitter, you can just use some alum powder. If you don't want to go through the glue steps, you can also use some sandpaper to give a rough texture to the inside of your polymer clay cups. Basically you want a nook and cranny texture for the crystals to adhere to and grow out from.
Crystals: Dissolve 1/4 cup of alum powder to 1 cup of boiling hot water. Add 30-40 drops of food coloring. Stir until alum powder is completely dissolved -- this is very important. Let the mixture cool slightly -- 2 to 3 minutes. Place prepared geode cups into the mixture. Set aside in a place that will not be disturbed for 2 days.
I find the ratio of 1/4 cup of alum to 1 cup of water to work well for me. You can add more alum powder but I would not use any less. I was able to make 8 large geodes (3-4 inches in diameter each) and still have 3/4 cup of alum powder left over for future projects.
I have attached some photos to this review. Hopefully you can see the difference in crystal size of the Jacquard vs. the Grocery store product. Also please note that the large crystal rock took 7 days to make -- every two days the crystal was removed from the water, more alum powder was added to the water mix, heated, and dissolved. And after the water cooled the crystal was put back in.
I purchased this to make eggshell geodes. They came out great! I purchased 2 bags because I wasn't sure how much I needed, but I barely used half of one bag to make 3. As a side note, if you are trying this and it is not working, make sure that the hot water isn't cooling quickly after you put the eggshell in the alum solution. The faster it cools, the smaller the crystals will be.
This Alum powder helped me have an extremely successful experiment. The process is using boiling water (2 cup), then 3/4 cup of alum, stir until completely dissolve, then microwave another 1 minutes, then pour the extremely boiling water to the container with 30 to 50 drops of food LIQUID colors( NOT food gel colors kind) . Then dumped the eggshell ( which was painted with school glue - Almer's Wasable, No Run School Glue inside and outside the eggshell, then sprinkle 1/4 cup of alum cover on inside and outside the eggshell, and let it dry for 24 hours) immediately in the container. Using bath tower cover the container to keep it hot as long as it can. After 12 hours ( no more), then dump the water out before becarefully using a spoon gently break the crystal on edges of the container ( do not touch to the crystal surrouding the eggshell, it is still very soft and easy to break), then gentle use your hand to bring the eggshell out, then you will have the perfect one as my picture.
My daughter used this powder to grow crystals out of an eggshell and it sure did work. I highly recommend this powder for growing crystals, it served its purpose well.
For Christmas I received a kit to make crystals. Through trial and error I was able to grow crystals. I loved it so much and ordered this product to make more, as well as bigger. I used four table spoons or 1/4 cup equivalent to 1 cup of water and used a clear glass jar. Heated in microwave, stirred and microwaved again, stirred until clear or almost clear. Once room temperature, I covered with plastic cling wrap. Not even 24 hours later a crystal made previously, I suspended in a jar, grew double the size I have recycled the smaller crystals to make more, just by adding 1 cup of water and use the same microwave technique until crystals completely dissolved. If you do not succeed the first time, try again. My first go around I added more Alum and used the same technique as above. Very pleased!
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