Lawn Ornaments: Frozen Water Balloons

This didn't quite work out as intended, but since I went to all the trouble to do and photograph it, damned if I'm not going to at least squeeze it for whatever blog post juice it might contain.

I borrowed this idea from an anonymous friend. It's pretty simple. You get a bunch of balloons, put a few drops of food coloring in each balloon, fill with water, tie off, and then leave them outside to freeze. When frozen, you pop the balloon, which leaves you with a rounded blob of colored ice, which you then arrange in an artful and decorative pattern.

So it's basically a technique for making your own temporary, winter-only gazing globes, I guess. Kinda.


Mine didn't turn out as intended. I had set them down on the ground in the back yard to freeze, next to one another, and although it got very cold on the night in question, they apparently managed to insulate one another well enough that only the tops froze: the bottoms stayed liquid.


This left me with a bunch of pastel, bowl-shaped pieces of ice, instead of the solid, brightly-colored spheroids I had been envisioning. Also disappointing: the balloons, when popped, immediately gushed water. I was trying to be careful, but I still managed to soak a glove while I was doing this, which was uncomfortable and inconvenient. A wet glove sticks to ice in sub-zero temperatures much the same way a wet tongue sticks to a metal pole, it turns out.


However, there was one good side to this: the colors, disappointingly pastel though they were, were at least all more or less equally pastel, so they still looked like they more or less went together, and the inverted-bowl shape reflected light interestingly, giving them a more metallic kind of look than they would otherwise have had.


It would have helped if there had been less snow on the ground when I did this, since from a distance, they kind of disappeared under the snow around them (which is why I didn't post any pictures of them from far away). But these are all lessons I can apply to next time. (Yes, I am planning a next time.) And I at least got one cool-looking photo out of it:


Oh! And! I also, in the process, managed to ruin one perfectly good laundry basket. It turns out that the maximum carrying capacity of a chilled plastic laundry basket is exactly five water-filled balloons. Tempting though it might be, don't add that sixth one: the basket handles will break on you, sending five water-filled balloons skittering around the plant room. The sixth will, of course, land on your white tennis shoes and burst, both soaking them and turning them lavender.