Ice Lanterns

I've been seeing ice lanterns kicking around the internet, and they are just so pretty! We had to try our own. When we went on our walk, we brought a basket and collected bits and pieces we thought would look nice encased in ice and lit from inside. When we got home, we laid them out on the kitchen floor and Kaia picked the flowers and berries and broke up sticks and separated everything into neat little piles.

We stacked together containers and jars, one smaller one inside one bigger one, and used expired tea light shells in the bottom between them. This maintains a gap underneath so that the ice lantern will have a bottom, and gave the top container something to rest on so it stayed centered. We weighted them down with rocks in the top container.

We filled the gap with water and Kaia selected bits from our piles to drop in.

We only had a few containers in the recycling to pilfer, so we ran out of containers while we still had lots of pine needles, twigs, flowers and berries. I got out our silicone castle bunt cake pan and we filled that up, too!

We left them outside overnight to freeze.

It took until evening the next day for them to finish freezing. We turned them up-side-down and poured hot water over them to loosen the ice from the containers and they popped right out.

We set tea lights in them and enjoyed their beauty. The dried flower petals give the ice a yellowed, "dirty" look in the photos, but in person they are distinct and lovely!