Faemom Crafts for Toddlers, Preschoolers and Kids

So now I’m thinking every Sunday night I should complain about a terrible craft, try to warn you about it before you try it.  When I worked for the Girl Scouts, we had to do all the crafts ahead of time so that we didn’t look like fools in front of the girls, loosing their attention, their respect, and our patience.  We met every quarter to do a week of crafts to make sure we worked out all the kinks.  We don’t have that luxury as parents.

So this last week I tried making rock candy for the boys from a book called EcoArt!: Earth-Friendly Art and Craft Experiences for 3 to 9-year-olds by Laurie Carlson.  This recipe calls for 4 cups of sugar to 1 cup of water, which ended in totally disaster.  I got the first two cups dissolved, but after stirring for forty-five minutes, I couldn’t get the last two cups of sugar to dissolve.  I finally gave up and poured the sugar water into glasses.  Big Mistake.  Huge Mistake!  I ended up with two glasses filled of hard candy that I have been trying to dissolve away for four days.

After talking to a few experts (my mom and grandma), they assured me that there was too much sugar in the mixture.  After looking online at the other recipes, I have to agree.  Apparently this recipe was to speed up the crystal growth, which didn’t work in my case (which I think is like trying to bake a cake faster at 500 degrees and that always works out well).  The recipe said nothing about boiling like the online recipes too. 

So stay away from crystal rock candy recipes with a lot of sugar to water ratio.  I’ll keep working on this recipe.  I also will try a few more crafts before returning this book to the library.