Pinterest Project - Ice Marbles

I originally saw this idea posted by Courtenay over at The Creek Line House who found it on Pinterest a few weeks ago when we were planning our big "snow bash" weekend at the cabin for Little Man's 4th birthday.  This is the perfect kind of low maintenance activity for a weekend of outdoors in the cold and didn't require a lot of supplies to pack and haul up there.  I had a stash of balloons and water balloons and some leftover food coloring.  Unfortunately I only had blue and yellow but I figured we could make due with that since we could at least combine different amounts to make shades of greens.

Our first night at the cabin I enlisted one of the bigger boys to help me fill the balloons.  We found out quickly that the water balloons didn't really make the round shape we wanted - they made more of an oval.  We also found that the kids needed help getting the balloons back off the nozzle of the faucet and balloons with small holes made big messes with the food coloring already in them...  

We set the balloons outside overnight to freeze and since it got down to single digits overnight they froze very quickly.  

We discovered that perhaps shaking the balloons a little after tying them shut would be a good idea next time.  The food coloring didn't always mix with the water like we expected and pockets of food coloring in some of the balloons didn't freeze.  

But they were pretty cool when we peeled the balloons off and saw the colors and patterns underneath.  

And the kids had fun rolling them down the snow-covered hill.  

We got busy with other things and forgot our plan to do bowling down the hill with empty 2-liter jugs but I imagine it would work very well.  As it was, the kids had fun "jumping" their ice marbles off the snow piles left by the plow.

About 2 weeks later we stopped by to pick up our snowmobiles on our way to an adults only trip and even though we had a huge fluctuation in weather with some 50 degree days and rain in between snow storms, shrunken versions of our ice marbles remained intact.  These would be a pretty winter yard ornament or object to place in a bird feeder in the garden over the winter in place of a gazing ball!