ice lanterns

Last night my lovely big girl celebrated six incredible years with her gorgeous teacher, Roger.
It is hard to express how grateful I feel for having the incredible fortune to have had him teach my eldest daughter for so long. He has opened up each child in his class with such patience, art and wisdom, and last night was a testament to his loving dedication to his job as a Steiner/Waldorf teacher and the Steiner/Waldorf curriculum itself. The children danced, played multiple instruments, sang and played on each other's songs they had composed, performed Eurythmy, recited poetry, all the while treating each other with love and respect. So humbling! So inspiring! I feel so grateful.

We made ice lanterns to adorn the tables, (a suggestion from my dear friend Anna).
She sent me a couple of links on how to do it and we just went for it. They worked beautifully, (mostly).

 and here's how we made them:
*get a reasonably deep bowl and rather skinny glass. 
*gather foliage of your choice and arrange in the bowl.
*pop the glass in the middle (it's good for it to sit on some of the foliage so that the water freezes underneath. then you have some ice for the tea light to sit upon at the bottom of the hole.
*you could sticky tape the glass to the bowl (just over the top) to prevent the tilting of the glass (we should have done it but had no tape on hand)
*pour water into bowl, but not right to the top.
*stick in the freezer!
*the next day, take out your bowls and allow to defost a little bit before immersing (not so the water gets inside the bowl, however) in very warm water. also pour warm water into the glass. After a while, or with some impatient digging and wobbling and extra warm water, take out the glass. and slip the lantern out of the bowl.
*place lantern on a dish which will collect the "meltage" (I think I just made up that word).
*pop a tea light into the middle and voila!! 
A totally gorgeous natural beautiful lantern for the table.
WARNING: don't take the bowl straight out of the freezer and put it straight into very hot water like I did with the first one! It will break your bowl!
Our lovely lanterns lasted well for the 4 hours on a roughly 18 degrees Celcius (about 65 Farenheit) evening.