Add sugar and water to a pan and heat over high heat, stirring constantly until it reaches a rolling boil. Be careful not to boil it too long or the candy will start to harden. Keep Stirring!

Remove from heat and keep stirring until all of the sugar granules have dissolved. The mixture will suddenly get clearer when this happens.

Carefully pour hot sugar mixture into your jars and put in the refrigerator to cool a bit. This usually takes 30 minutes to one hour depending on the size of your jars.. We don't want the mixture to be cold, just room temperature.

While your mixture is cooling, prepare your wooden skewers by tying baker's twine to the top then getting them damp and rolling them in sugar. Once they have a coating of dry sugar on them, put them aside to dry. This sugar coating will give our sugar mixture something to attach itself to and help us have bigger sugar crystals in our rock candy!

When they cool to near room temperature, remove the jars from the refrigerator. If you are adding flavoring or food coloring do that step now.

Tie baker’s twine to your picks and dangle them into the sugar mixture, try to keep them from touching the bottom or each other. Once you get the picks placed where you want them in the jar, hold their strings along the sides of the jar screw the top on to hold the strings in place.

Set the jar aside somewhere where it won't be disturbed and wait 3-10 days for the sugar crystals to grow, the longer you wait the larger the crystals will get.

When the crystals grow to a good size, they are ready to dry. Tie two straws into an X and balance it on top of a clean jar. Carefully remove the rock candy sticks from their jars and tie their strings onto the straw X’s. Don’t let them touch each other, let them hang in the jar from the X until they are dry.

Once they are dry they are ready to eat!