Icy Mosaics

So I’m talking Fun with Ice and Snow on Newschannel 13’s Live at Noon tomorrow, and I’m gathering props and testing crafts. I tried blowing bubbles in the freezing weather, but the results were  lackluster (especially irritating when I hear about this all the time, and it’s all over the internet, like if you Google frozen bubble images or if friends have shared this recent photo post), so that was a bust.

But I thought icy mosaics was cool (okay, freezing) and fun:

First, you pour water into a baking sheet or a casserole dish, enough so that it’s about a quarter inch or half inch deep. Then add food coloring to the water to make it a pretty color, and set it out to freeze. Maybe do a few different colors, like so:

As the water freezes, the colors start to look paler, so go for deep and dark.

Once you have colored ice, you or your kids can crack it up. We used a large metal serving spoon to break up the pieces, and then I collected the various colors:

The girls couldn’t stop oooh-ing and ahhh-ing over these.

Then you just treat the pieces like shards of pottery in a mosaic. I started out thinking that a nice little bed of snow on a paper plate would be a good base, but I think water worked better. I poured a thin layer of cold water onto a plastic lid, then put the ice pieces onto the water, and afterwards, they all froze together:

Pretty!

One thing to keep in mind: hands get COLD with this craft if you are silly enough to do it with bare hands, so either insist on gloves or have a nice little bowl of warm water on hand if your mosaic artist feels that bare hands are essential to her craft, so (s)he can warm up between placing pieces. I’d have more examples, but the girls were hell-bent on watching Downton Abbey online today and they’d already made a bunch of icy sun catchers for me, so we cut the crafting short.