Ice Lights

It’s been really cold at night. Grampa said he wanted to work on something special. So he told me to bring over any empty ice cream buckets we had at home. We had 3. Grampa had 2 buckets. 

Grampa’s idea was to make covers for a string of lights to go down each side of his front walk. What we did was fill the ice cream buckets with water and set them outside to freeze, but not completely.  The next morning Grampa checked the top of each bucket by poking a hole in the top with a screw driver. What he was looking for was ice all around the edges and at the bottom of the ice cream bucket, but still water in the middle.

When the bucket had ice all around, Grampa put in a bigger hole in the middle of the ice and then dumped out the water that hadn’t froze yet. That left a hollow piece of ice. The ice cream bucket is shaped with a little bit of a slant. The bottom is narrower than the top. All we had to do was take each bucket into the kitchen and dunk them into a sink full of hot water for a few seconds. Then these giant hollow ice cubes just slipped out!

We spent all week making the ice cream bucket ice cubes. Then Grampa strung out a string of LED Christmas lights on each side of his walk. We turned the big ice cubes upside down over each light so that they sat inside the hole of the ice. That makes the ice cube light up and it looks really pretty!

The lights inside the ice cubes are different colours so you can see them through the clear ice. Grampa said maybe next year we’ll try adding food colouring to the water so that the ice will be the same colour as each bulb. That would look even better!