Early 2014 was so cold and snowy here in Connecticut that we had lots of opportunities to experiment with freezing things outside. The kids and I tried out so many ideas. Some like the ice sun catchers and ice lanterns made it to the blog, others like the stain glass windows in our snow fort seen in the picture below didn't.
And then there was this project that we had lots of fun doing so I thought we'd try again and this time share it with you. And so as soon as the temperatures dipped the kids had me out freezing water again to make our Rainbow Iced Bird Feeders. So beautiful to see on a cold day in January especially as you sit inside with a warm mug of hot chocolate and watch all the visiting winter birds.
You will need:
A few empty take out containers or similar
Food coloring
Water
Two bowls one of which fits inside the other
Bird Seed
Step 1
Fill each of the take out containers with water and place a few drops of food coloring in each one. Make each container a different color if you can.
Then taking the two bowls fill the large bowl with water (not quite to the top as you don't want it to over flow when you place the other bowl inside of it), add a few drops of food coloring to this too. Then in the smaller bowl put a little water to weight it down, you don't want it to sit on the bottom of the larger bowl but the space this takes is what will be the bowl you place the seed in so you do want it sunk enough to give space for seed.
To make sure the smaller bowl stays somewhat central we added tape to old it in place as it floated.
Step 2
Place your containers outside to freeze, depending on how cold it is in your area you may need to leave them anywhere from a couple of hours to overnight. We left our first try out for about 4 hours and it was frozen solid but the larger feeder bowl was out overnight.
Step 3
Once frozen you can turn the ice out of the containers, if they are difficult to remove you can always warm the outside of the container in warm water for a minute or two to release it. When taking the two bowls apart to free the ice be careful not to crack the iced bowl you have created.
At this point you can just rest one on top of the others as we did for our first try.
However the next morning we were lucky enough to have had snow too so we used a little snow to glue the larger feeder together.
Once assembled, fill with seed and wait.
It wasn't long before our hungry feathered friends were visiting
We even had a flock of noisy Blue Jays stop by
This woodpecker just watched on from the sidelines
Such a pretty way to brighten a winter garden
No comments:
Post a Comment