For anyone who's every made rock candy before??!?!
Answers: please help if uve ever made homemade rock candy before. recently i saw a bill nye video at school and it showed a person making rock candy. and i tried it... i put 2 cups of water in the pot and 1 cup of water in the pot also and boiled it until the sugar was gone... and it's been four days now and nothing's happening! it's supposed to start growing after like two days or something.. acan anyone tell me what they did? cause i hav eno idea what i did wrong! thank you
I have grown sugar crystals successfully after previous failed attempts.
The secret is to be sure your solution is supersaturated. In other words, the solution has to contain as much dissolved sugar as possible.
Boil one cup of water and add sugar. Stir until dissolved. Then, keep adding sugar by the tablespoonfuls, stirring after each addition, until you've added three cups of sugar. Keep the solution boiling.
Pour into a large glass container or jar. Tie a piece of string onto a popsicle stick and hang it across the top of the jar, letting the string dangle down into the solution. Some people tie on a small clean rock to weight it at the end (do not use fishing leaded weights).
It is also important NOT TO MOVE your solution once you've put in the string. I tied on several strings. You also can add food coloring. I made mine blue.
You needed to have stuck in a piece of string for the crystals to grow on. If not, you could have dropped in a few pieces of "seed crystal" or sugar grains. Also, try not to put the jar in a draft where the top can cool off too quickly. If you use too small a jar, the entire solution will crystalize in one huge hunk and won't come out.
I was so happy when my crystals began to grow after only one day. I let them sit for more than a week and the crystals got really big.
Good luck! :)
Well, I don't know what Bill Nye said on the video but the principal behind rock candy is to reach the glass transition state. This state enables the sugar to start forming a crystalline structure which makes it look as though it is growing but it truly isn't. I have never seen Rock Candy "grow." Also, there is a very important step to rock candy and that is making sure you hit the proper temperature. You need to do more than boil it. It has to be superheated and supersaturated. Superheated so it can become supersaturated. Also, try it on a string instead of a stick if you used a stick. That seems to be more successful for some reason.