I am not much of a home crafter. I see things at craft fairs, or in stores, and think “I could make that” but, of course, I never do.

Same thing with Pinterest. The stuff is really cool, but the chances of me making sliding drawers that fit under my stairs or a pillowcase out of old socks are pretty slim.

But then I saw the frozen coloured water balloons. And, I knew I’d be in the frozen east (aka Ottawa) over the holidays. And, I knew my niece, M, would be totally into trying these.

So, in the spirit of the Pintester (f**king up pins so we don’t have to), we acquired some balloons and some minus a million degrees weather and we were good to go.

The instructions say, “fill the balloons with water and then add food colouring.” Yeah, right.

First off, we didn’t have liquid food colouring, just paste. So, we mixed up a bowl of pink water, stuck a funnel in the balloon and attempted to fill it. No go. The water just sat in the funnel.

Then, we tried using the turkey baster to squeeze the pink water into the balloon. Which resulted in pink water sprayed all over the kitchen. Oh, M and I now have pink hands (turns out food colouring stains) and my sister now has a pink turkey baster.

We needed a forceful way to get the water into the balloon. We tried the bathroom tap. Which worked great except that once the balloon was filled with water, there was no way to get the food colouring into it without spraying the whole bathroom with water. Plus, I think the giggling wasn’t helping.

But, having cleaned up most of the kitchen and now the bathroom we weren’t about to give up. We put the food colouring paste into the balloon, then filled it with water. Slightly messy but success!!

We made three – pink, blue and green – and left two outside to freeze and put one in the freezer to, well, freeze.

They turned out totally awesome. The freezer green one has lots of cool cracks in it, the pink one has bubbles and the blue one froze to a dark blue inner core with an outer lighter edge.

Now, if we can just keep the dog from licking them into oblivion hopefully they last a few days.

M wants to try something else from Pinterest. I’m sure my brother-in-law won’t mind if we renovate the stairs?!