Ice Lantern Tutorial

We made these ice lanterns for Candlemass. Another blog mamma was making Earth Candles.. But our yard is covered in 5 feet of snow so I got to thinking.. What CAN we do? (pun intended). If you add a little food coloring to the water you could make them red for Valentine's Day.. For that matter the white is pretty too.

First you will need two containers. One is cardboard and the other glass. Milk cartons would also work for the larger one. The only important detail is that the glass jar just needs to be smaller than the other container.. Oh, and it helps if you can cut the larger one later. ummm, I'll explain that later. We made a mistake.

Fill the large container with water while the little container is inside to take in account water displacement.
 
Fill the small container with something to weigh it down that you can easily take out later. We used corn.

Freeze the container and then pour out the weights (i.e. corn). Fill the empty weight container with warm (not hot) water. It will melt the ice slightly on the inside so you can pull the jar out.

 

Then try to melt the outside the same way to slip the ice out... We did not take into account that ice expands and cardboard has some give to it.. ah hem.. Blushing... But it still worked out, we just had to cut the cardboard away (yes it was recycled), and then we took it outside to enjoy our new lantern.

 Have a beautiful Weekend Everyone. Happy Valentines day!