I used lye and naphtha, and I kinda gave up on it after I started it, figured it was a lost cause cuz I did it, but a couple weeks later it started to grow crystals, very similar to yours, I just sucked up all the top layer with a nice syringe turkey baster kinda thing from a supermarket, metal tip, cut the tip flush and sucked out the top layer, my last stage was just freezing so I wanted the entire top layer in a dish anyway, the fact that there were crystals in it didn't really make a difference, but I had to carefully pick a couple out of the threshold between layers where they were enlodged, it took some dark crap with em but I put all the clear in a dish and tilted it back and forth rinsing the dark out some, but I'll tell ya, those crystals dark or not didn't matter, packed some really nice punch, your method isn't the same as mine but I hope my response was some help, good luck and be patient