Caution - best not to get any of this stuff on your skin so be sensible, wear gloves and don't rub your eyes!
So you need:
Sodium Silicate solution 32-40%ish works fine - we bought ours from www.Mistralni.co.uk - This is the solution that fills the jar so get enough to fill your jam-jar or other glass container with a lid...
WEAR GLOVES WHEN HANDLING THIS STUFF!!!
Any transition metal sulphates that you like the colour of... (need to be soluble in water for recrystalisation)
We used:
Copper Sulphate (blue)
Potassium permanganate (purple)
Cobalt Chloride (violet)
Ferrous Sulphate (Iron2sulphate) (light green)
Nickel sulphate would work well for green
Chromates are good nice yellows and reds with those
Middle of the top line of the transition metals on the periodic table basically... (chromium to copper along the periodic table, period 4)
Container - clean Jam jars with a lid work well. If you use plastic you don't know what strength the plastic is so best to avoid it - but you need to be able to put a tight lid on so jam/pickle/etc glass jars work very well here...
Now we found the crystals that we received weren't very large so we needed to do some re-crystalisation with them first but it may work ok just using what you get in the packet... But the bigger the crystal the more effective the result.
(re)Crystalisation: Dissolve a small amount of the crystals in the minimum amount of boiling water. The heat ensures the greatest saturation of reagent to compound (chemical to water)... Put in a large shallow flatish dish to evapourate the water - larger crystals will form as it cools and evapourates... This may take a day or two Maximum... A watch glass is ideal but how many of us have those hanging around
A windowsil is the best place to leave this but the weather isn't ideal right now...Then
Dob some crystals in the bottom of the jar in small SEPERATE piles.
GENTLY pour in some sodium silicate ensuring not to disturb the piles of stuff. We used a basting pippete and dribbled it down the side or put it on the bottom so it gently floated in if that makes sense.
DON'T just pour it in from the container!!!
Put enough in to 3/4 -fill the jar. Put the lid on and enjoy!
It develops over time, ours did very quickly, best results leave alone for 24hrs (take pics as it develops to see how it goes)
Tada enjoy!
