Okay - a Winter experiment and a bit of a rant!

[kuhio98]

Karen ~ Good luck!
I once spent a week making ice luminaries to line our driveway for our annual Christmas party. Bobcat laughed at me the whole time.
They looked great. This isn't our photo, but they turned out something like this:

The night before the party, I took them out of our deep freeze and set them out on the deck. Figured they'd be safe, after all it was December in Alaska, right?
Around midnight, a Chinook (warm winter wind) came down from the mountains. Bobcat felt bad about laughing at me when we awoke to find them melted down to nothing.

[Karen]

Karen ~ Good luck!
I once spent a week making ice luminaries to line our driveway for our annual Christmas party. Bobcat laughed at me the whole time.
They looked great. This isn't our photo, but they turned out something like this:

The night before the party, I took them out of our deep freeze and set them out on the deck. Figured they'd be safe, after all it was December in Alaska, right?
Around midnight, a Chinook (warm winter wind) came down from the mountains. Bobcat felt bad about laughing at me when we awoke to find them melted down to nothing.

Aww, well, those look lovely, and I sure yours were every bit as pretty! I, being a born and bred New Englander, I am well accustomed to not being able to count of the weather remain any particular way for long! But I imagine you were quite surprised!

[Karen]

Okay, here are the "result pictures" - more of an interesting experiment than a beautiful ornament, as you can tell:

Here's a close-up, resting on a paper plate from when I brought it inside a few days ago, just set it on that and stuck it in the freezer after I took off the outer balloon:



Then a bit further away from it so you can start to see the odd pattern of the food coloring versus clearer water:



When I went to put it down, I dropped it - hence the mark on the show to the right, then dropped some birdseed on it. The stray red bits of stuff in the snow are actually from the fruit of the tree, not the balloon experiment, by the way.



And from furthest away, you can see the odd almost colorless stripe - note that I could not have done that on purpose if I tried - just squirted some food coloring into the balloon then added tap water all at once.



Not exactly the "easy, pretty decoration" promised by the people who post it on Facebook and the like! And I know it will make a mess as it melts, which is why I set it on the snow, to be able to see the pattern as it spreads ...

[Karen]

The squirrels, by the way, were pretty wary of it, but eventually succumbed to the seeds' allure!

[Taz_Zoee]

I saw this project and the pictures of it they looked so pretty and almost sparkling. Of course I can't try it living here in California.
I still think yours looks pretty neat anyway!

[Lady's Human]

Probably if you took time to polish the orb, it would sparkle, but the surface of a balloon is NOT perfect/

Just ordered some stuff for next year's Christmas science experiment.

[Karen]

It was shinier when first taken out of the balloon, granted.

But I did expect the color to be more evenly distributed! The flat spot it is resting on is where the gas bubble formed on the top of the balloon as it was laying in the snowbank as the ice froze.

[redbird]

Not bad Karen, it looks pretty nice to me. I give you lots of credit for trying, well done

[Asiel]

That's quite the orb Sounds like a real pot of trouble but I have balloons here and if this crazy weather doesn't give I just might give that a try.... maybe one green and one red...to put near the bird feeder to scare the squirrels away, they can empty 3 large tubes in less than a week , the bluejays are quite the scavengers also.

[Karen]

That's quite the orb Sounds like a real pot of trouble but I have balloons here and if this crazy weather doesn't give I just might give that a try.... maybe one green and one red...to put near the bird feeder to scare the squirrels away, they can empty 3 large tubes in less than a week , the bluejays are quite the scavengers also.

Hee hee - and maybe if you just move them around a bit every couple days, they will continue to be "scary!" to them!

Interesting potential variations on the experiment would be figuring out if different colors or kinds of food coloring take longer or shorter to freeze ... or if adding in things like glitter would help or hurt the freeze time ... although Paul swears any purveyor of glitter has my picture taped behind the counter as warning not to sell me any ... so someone else may have to try that one! Still have no idea why that one slice has so much less color than the rest of it ...

[Freedom]

I just came back hoping to see photos and there they are! I think this is a great first try, Karen, a big red almost football shape! And the pic of the 2 squirrels trying to sort out this new thing is just what I love! He hee, they sure are curious, aren't they? And tempted by the seed.

Great work, Karen! It is larger than I expected, especially after you wrote about it not freezing and such. Very interesting experiment!