To the left is a collage of pictures that will give you a little rundown of what happens during a Crystal growing lab in Chemistry. It is fairly rather easy to make a crystal although it may seem like a long and tedious task. To start this experiment you fill a beaker with distilled water and then saturate with a powdered substance called Alum. When it is all put together that is when you put the beaker full of stuff on a Bunsen burner and begin to heat the solution and begin to add more Alum. After we did this you then have to wait for it to cool, which is the next day in class. To do this we used a hot plate with a white pill looking magnet inside to mix and heat the solution. My group took to the eyeballing side of the experiment. Which really just means that we didn't measure how much Alum we had used since the start which was that we started with 50 grams of Alum. So after we had dissolved all of the Alum we then added an unknown amount of yellow, blue and green food coloring to the mix to then later on turn out to be an aqua-ish color as shown in our half-way grown crystal in the bottom left picture. Wait now im not done just yet. Then two days later we came back and our crystal looked like the one in the lower left hand picture. So we took the crystal out of the beaker and made more of the Alum and H20 solution and we also changed the color. Which created a yellow and green mixture of food coloring to make lime green, that is why the color of the crystal changed. After we had given our solution a little boost or "steroids" you could say, the next day our crystal grew in size. Creating the end product in the lower right-hand picture.
P.S- We didn't plan for our crystal to grow in the shape it did. Hence we call it the elephant head shaped crystal..nothing else! hahaha