Ice sculptures and lanterns

Another cold snow day and following on from our iced sun-catchers we decided to continue with our experiments of freezing. I mean if its going to hit -6F with a real feel of -25F what else is there to do? As you'll see in these pictures snow days are lazy days in this household, why get out of your PJ's before you have to?

For this you will need:

Balloons

Food coloring variety of colors

Water

We began by mixing the food colorings with water and then trying to fill the balloons. Although this proved to be a lot of fun for the kids it was not filling the balloons as I wanted it to. 

I think I could have left them all with balloons the size of eggs and they would have been happy, however I wanted to turn them into lanterns so I took a new approach. Rather than filling the balloons with colored water I filled them from the tap and then we added a few drops of food coloring, this was much easier and left us with bigger balloons.

As you can see D just wanted to play with the droppers so he began painting the paper towels.

Once we had filled the balloons with different colors we put them out in the snow to freeze.

I had read on other blogs that to turn them into lanterns you leave the balloons for about 4 hours so they part freeze and then cut the balloon and you are left with a hollow shape. I guess its too cold for that and I should have shortened the time because when we opened them up they were completely frozen. They did make very pretty Easter eggs though!

So we tried again and this time I froze bowls of colored water with a floating candle. That was far more successful but I will try the balloon freeze again soon.

Our front steps are very colorful now with a warm glow. Just what you need on a cold night in January.