Ice Diamond Stack

Ice Diamond Stack, originally uploaded by ...escher....

Last night I sat excitedly on the couch with my eyes glued to the thermometer and the outside temperature. It was the first time that it had registered a negative value since last Winter.

First thing this morning I headed to the place where I built the Snow Ice Cairn in the hope that there would be some ice. It was very cold but there wasn't any usable ice there.

Instead I went to the little pool where I made these and the ice there was good. I chopped out some sections and searched for a place to stack them.

The slabs of ice weren't perfectly flat and slid about a bit and I needed to handle them with gloves off for dexterity. The first attempt fell over pretty quickly as you can see in this timelapse sequence and it also took on a major lean which I didn't notice until I reviewed the pictures.

I wanted to build it really wide in the middle as you can see from the other attempts below but each time it toppled the longer ones broke so I couldn't make it as wide as I wanted.

The temperature hovered around freezing and so any liquid on their surfaces from the heat of my hands meant that the smallest pieces would slide which made it all the more difficult as the smallest was at the bottom. But I persevered and this was the result.

I left it there in the hope that it would freeze together but when I went to check this evening it had toppled. But I was surprised to find the 3 Sun Wheels still there from last week with only two leaf sections missing.

Oh and I've updated the LandArtForKids.com site with some new 'How to's'.

LandArtforKids.com