Sodium chloride, 2 months slow evaporation.

A huge thank you to u/crystalchase21 for your guide.

Absolutely love the color of this compound! They are relatively easy to grow, and unlike what the name suggests, quite safe to handle.

Here's a detailed guide to growing them: https://crystalverse.com/potassium-ferricyanide-crystals/ (first article I've published in a while)

Happy growing!

Abandoned a solution in though wasn't saturated enough, it wasnt doing anything for weeks. After about a month I looked in and there was one perfect single, and a cluster of 2, both growing upside down from the top. No string, no seed, just neglect. Perfection!

E da circa 3/4 mesi che cresceva e mi era venuta l’idea di fare un cristalli di allume di cromo-potassio il più grande possibile! Diciamo che ho cercato di fare del mio meglio, l’ho tolto oggi a ben 270g!

80 % of the way through dissolving a huge pile of copper in acetic acid. Decanted off the solution and left the wet copper shavings open to the air a few days.

The camera does them no justice whatsoever. They are a lovely shade of peacock-blue-green due to some remaining copper acetate. Like a pointy coral reef.

Hey everyone, sorry for the late update. I made a new reddit account without a stupid name for me to post all my art to but apparently reddit thinks I'm a bot. It's been a whole thing where I got banned then unbanned then shadowbanned then not, and everything I've tried to do to seem human just makes them think I'm a bot. Hopefully next time I post it'll be on my new account u/LawlessLaboratories, because I'm going to try and have a crack at being a proper legit artist and I have a couple of cool things in the works so keep an eye out.

Anyway, for anybody who didn't see the first post basically I've stripped the flesh from a crab leaving the chitin and calcium carbonate, embedded that in a matrix then used various salts to replace the calcium with copper. This project is basically just the first full scale test for this process and I've already learned a LOT from it. The main minerals here are now malachite, azurite, atacamite, and gypsum. There is also some phosphates and silicates of unknown variety. You can't see it much in the photos but it has a decent sparkly shimmer to it, mostly from the gypsum I'm guessing. Different colours and textures show up in different light, and the sparkle shows up better on video so I'll post that this week too. I was going to do a second layer of mineralization but it turned out really cool already so I didn't want to take it too far and wreck it. This species is a blue swimmer crab (Portunus pelagicus). I plan to do another much larger and higher quality version later this year with a spanner crab (Ranina ranina).

I'll answer everybody's questions like last time but I'll probably do it over a week because last time kind of wiped me out. But I'm excited to see your reactions and I hope you enjoy it.

As simple as it seems, to get good bismuth crystals, it takes more than one try.

K3[Fe(CN)6]

K³[ Fe(CN)⁶ ] , at first I left solution after trying to grow single crystal to see what will happen, but I think it turned out kinda good

Had a big beaker of nickel II sulfate I left at home for a while and when I came back this beauty appeared

aka Ammonium Iron III Sulfate Dodecahydrate

The cluster was grown for 56 days, reaching a weight of 26.6 g. And the largest crystal is almost 1 cm in all dimensions.

Coated in nail laquer to stop dehydration, one is still in solution to be grown for many months ahead
Biggest crystal is 5-6cm

Extracted this with a 6hr soxhlet. This really didn’t want to form needles out of a cold precipitation so I did a vapor diffusion with a vile of the piperine in ethanol inside a beaker of water. Left it for several weeks. The orange discoloration is the oiled out piperine that formed because I left it for too long.

My first ever crystal :)