Epic Fail: Dollar Store find, or was it?

     I will fully and freely admit now that I am wholly addicted to dollar stores, my favorite: my local Dollar Tree. There is no telling what you can find there. Case in point, the crystal growing kits I found a couple of weeks ago. I ended up buying two of each of the three sets they had because I knew the moment that my son saw these he would want to do some.

       Yeah, I know, not a very good picture. I tried to get a picture for them off of the Dollar Tree site but who would have thought they wouldn't have one? Anyway, so after almost 3 weeks of procrastinating we finally did the kits. I wish I had gotten some progress shots, alas I forgot. A piece of advice now, if you try this type of kit, won't hurt to put it in a disposable foil pan or something (which ironically is also available at the Dollar Tree) to help keep the mess down, you'll see what I mean in the next pictures. 

My son was fascinated with them and for the first day every time I turned around he was on the step stool in the kitchen looking to see if anything had grown. 

These are both "after" shots, and had been sitting on my kitchen counter for about two and a half days. This is where the pan would have been good. The kits got knocked around several times, either from my son pushing them or my husband throwing things on the counter. A fairly significant part of my counter is now stained pink, the purple and green cleaned up pretty well, the red however left a pink stain that I don't even want to imagine how long it will take to get off. The purple one looked like it may have grown just a little bit but nada on the others. All the instructions said was hot water, next time I think I'll heat the water up in the kettle!

Edited to Add: I'm still trying to get the stains out of the kitchen counter, my cousin Tiffani said that she also tried these and her's didn't work either. I still have one more set so I might give it one more shot or I might just toss those and go for the good ones!