A grace note for winter

[pegkerr]

What a wonderful winter Old World custom they are reviving in a city here in Minnesota. The pictures are lovely of the ice candles on the gravesites.

Comments

[jbru.livejournal.com]

There's one photo on the web site. It looks lovely and ghostly. I'm not completely clear on how they're made so that a candle fits in, but they look cool!

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

If you fill a bucket with water and leave it out over night, it will partially freeze, first around the outside, where the water touches the bucket. You ease the bucket off and pour out the water, and you have a hollow ice candle. They are indeed very pretty.

[tassie-gal.livejournal.com]

I got the photos off teh web site. They are really gorgeous.

[channe.livejournal.com]

Awesome.

But I must confess that my first response was: "oh my gosh, there's a city called 'Embarrass?'"

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Take a balloon and fill it with water, to about the size you want the holder to be. (Be sure not to inflate it to max.) Put it outside in freezing weather. This next part is by-guess-and-by-golly, but when it has formed a good hard icy outside, bring it inside. Punch a hole through the ice on top and dump out the remaining water. Stick it back outside right away. When you're ready, put candles inside the ice balls.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Oh! They have updated to include the picture. Hurray!

[jbru.livejournal.com]

See, I would expect it to form a kind of cap on the top of the bucket. And while I suppose the sides would freeze too, it seems like the top would get thickest fastest. Well, I guess I have a science experiment for January!

[jbru.livejournal.com]

OK, that makes sense. Since the ice will expand as it freezes, the "less than full capacity" would have to be much less, I'd expect. Have you done this? I think I'll give it a try come January.

[naomikritzer]

Oh yeah. Minnesotans all know about Embarrass, because that's where the records for cold are always set. If it's really cold all over the state, weather reports will always tell you the temperature at the MSP airport, the temperature that's local to you, and the temperature in Embarrass, because that's going to be so horrifyingly cold that it will make what you're currently suffering sound practically tropical by comparison.

It is a funny name, though. Especially since embarrassment is commonly thought of as a hot emotion, not a cold one. They should have called it North Pole or Ice Dam or Really @#&*ing Coldville or something.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Yes, I have done it. The results were beautiful.

I haven't been there for a long time, but the Como Zoo used to decorate with these for their evening Christmas event.

[peacockharpy.livejournal.com]

Happy Solstice!

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Oh, how lovely! I will snag, if you don't mind, with thanks.

[jbru.livejournal.com]

Pretty!

[peacockharpy.livejournal.com]

It was absolutely for you, and you may share it with anyone you like. :)

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

It's just lovely. Will you reveal how you did it?

[peacockharpy.livejournal.com]

I copied the picture (using alt-print-screen), then trimmed it to a square-ish shape. Then I put the text in. (The "in dark places" part has black text beneath the white text, to make it stand out.) Then I re-sized it to 100x100 pixels.

I'm not good with the tricksy filters and layers and such. My icon-making is fairly basic. But it was such a beautiful image, and Peg has often remarked on liking the line "a light in dark places," so I put it together.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

It is a beautiful image, and don't say you're not clever with these things! I tried a straight copy to disk, and since they'd blocked it, I went on--much too busy to figure it out right now.

I respect their right to blockage--and I would have paid them for the image, if it had come up as: Icon use, $1.00, click here or something. But I'm not going to contact the newspaper for an icon.

Not going to add to the stress this month! ;^)