Summertime Ice Sculptures

I always am looking for new ways to beat the heat. I like hot weather but I like to do new and interesting things too so I am always thinking of new ways to entertain myself and my family. In this part of the country people like to make ice sculptures in the winter so I figure why not make some in the summer? I could be fun.

I took some large plastic containers and filled them up with water and set them in a big freezer for a few days. I wanted the ice to be nice and hard for our ice sculptures. I waited until the ice had been frozen solid for a day before I started this project.

Then I borrowed some tools from my son who, by the way, collects tools so he was a perfect victim to borrow some tools from. I picked out a few hammers and chisels of assorted sizes and shapes. Then I got my family together to see how creative they could be with ice in the summer. We put our ice on a big sturdy picnic table and got busy on some designs we had previously thought of.

We all picked out a hammer and a chisel and started gently tapping on the ice in places that we wanted to break off some ice from. As we got small pieces of ice knocked off our blocks of ice we couldn't resist the thought of putting our ice chips in our mouths and on each other. It was quite cooling and fun at the same time. As time went on we found it even more fun to put larger chunks of ice down each others shirts. In a very short time we were wet and cooled off very sufficiently so my idea of making ice sculptures to cool off worked wonderfully.

We were very new at making ice sculptures so our sculptures were not of contest quality but they were fun to make. We ended up with some very unusual looking sculptures on our picnic table. The weather was so hot that they melted in very short order. Our sculptures were on the small side too. On average our sculptures were about one foot by one and a half feet by six inches. They were small but fun to make and watch melt.