.How To Build Snow Candles

Hi Everyone,

For those of you with any snow left, mine as almost gone now or I would be out there doing these. I found these today on some very eccentric mans web-site way thought you might like these. I say eccentric as he seems to do a lot of stuff with wires and batterries. I'm sure his not really eccentric, but anyone who can recharge their ipod from a bicycle dynamo has got to be a little eccentric, but I mean it in a mad nutty professor kind of way.

Here's what the guy said:-

When I grew up in Sweden a common thing to do with the children (that would be me back then) was to build snow lights. As you have a lot of snow, it gets dark at 3pm and you want the children to play outside you would hand them a bunch of candles and send them out to build snow lights all around the house. Later on you would light them up and stand in the kitchen window to look at them.
Well, back then, being a child and everything, it was the coolest thing to see as a well build one can burn all through the night and still be lit in the morning.

Now I have kids on my own and of course this was something I just had to do with them. But - no one here (I moved to the Netherlands a couple of years ago) ever heard of these and they were all amazed of my innovative little product when I lit it in the evening. So if people here haven’t heard of them then surly there are more people in the world missing out on some winter time fun with the children.

You can do this as long as the snow can be compressed into snow balls, so between +1 c / 33 f down to -7 c / 19 f or so.

To avoid some frustration later on we will take a piece of paper and shape it into a cone. This will be placed on the candle while we’re building it as we don’t want the wick to get wet by snow. You could skip this and if it gets wet by snow then you just have to use a couple of matches extra before it gets lit.

Cut off the candle so that it has a proper length. In my case I just had to cut it in half. Then place the candle in some snow and press some extra snow around it so that it stays stable.

Make snow balls! Press them together firmly but not too hard. They have to be able to slide into each other later on so one or to firm presses is usually enough. A good size of a snow ball is about 5 cm / 2 inches. Place about eight of them in a circle with about 5 cm / 2 inches space to the candle. Smaller ring and the snow balls with melt and larger and it will easily fall apart.

Build another ring of snow balls on top of the first one. Carefully try to push the ring together but don’t use more then a little force. Press to hard and all of it will collapse. We don’t want that

Now make the third ring with less balls, like 5-6 so that it gets smaller. As they will tilt inwards you will need to make them balance on each other without falling down into the centre. It takes some practice but it isn’t that hard. Then place a last three snow balls on top to close it off.

Wait until it gets dark and lit ‘em up! You would think that the heat from the candle would make the whole construction to collapse but that doesn’t happen. What does happen though is that the top balls melt on the inside but as it’s (hopefully) freezing the cold keeps the majority of the snow ball frozen.

To light one of these I usually use a candle lighter, you know one of those with a long tube. Just stick it in through a gap between the balls and flip the protective paper off then you can light it.

If there’s a lot of wind then you can carefully take some snow and close off the gaps between the snow balls. It will loose some if its effect but the candle will stay lit. If you build one - send me a picture. I’d love to see how creative you are!

Found HERE on an eccentric site, not really for us girls, more a boys site as the guy seems to want to make things or take other things apart.

NOTE TO NUTTY:- don't let the boy near this site!!!!!!!!