Making "Ice Gems" With The Boys

It's finally starting to feel like winter around here, which means more time spent in the house with the boys.  I've been taking advantage of my Pinterest board full of ideas to do with my boys, and we decided to make these cool ice gems this week! (Thank you to my friend Cindy who pinned these!)

I won't post every detail since the original tutorial already does a great job with that!  But here are a few photos of ours...

Adding food coloring to the balloons - I think I did 2 or 3 drops.

You do really need to stretch the opening over the faucet for them to fill up.  Learned that the hard way before I read that detail!

The boys thought these were pretty cool! 

I didn't quite trust them to fill a balloon full of dye but they loved holding, poking, and squishing them and helping me carry them outside to freeze!

We lined them up on the deck, right outside the sliding glass door so the boys could watch them freeze.  I put them in a shallow cardboard box which worked great!

After two days Sammy just couldn't wait to unwrap them!

Here they are lined up on the rocks leading to the front door!  So pretty!

This one actually had black food coloring.  Turned out kinda neat!

Toby peeking out the window at the pretty "gems!"

The colors actually turned out really quite uniform in comparison to the tutorial.  Too bad the balloon broke on the red one before it froze all the way...we would have had a whole rainbow!  And what perfect timing...we unwrapped these on the day of little Toby's 2nd birthday party and they were really fun decorations to have outside as our family walked to the front door!