Re: Making Diamonds in your garage

To my knowledge,
fabricating artificial diamonds requires pressures & temperatures not
accessable in anyone's garage.  

The 'diamonds' might have been silicate formations.  These are sold in
toy or hobby shops as 'grow your own rocks' kits.  A company such as Edmund
Scientific may sell them as well. 

My final guess is that the girl in the article  was growing diamond-like
crystals from evaporating solutions of inorganic or organic salts.  A
common version of this experiment is to make a saturated solution of alum
(aluminum potassium sulfate), let it evaporate, and collect seed crystals
from what is left after the evaporation.  Then the selected seed crystal
is suspended from a string in another saturated solution of alum.  The
seed crystal grows over a period of a week or two into a large crystal
of the material.  The recipe for this & other crystal-growing recipes
can be found in public or university libraries.  Maybe the girl was growing
a crystal of a salt that assumed the diamond structure.

Regards, Myron Cagan