Save for skiing, I tend to hermit in winter and spend time in the warm embrace of indoors rather than February’s cold winds. Inspired by every kids love of playing in the snow and Ottawa’s Winterlude I wanted to create a snow fort.  Originally I saw a post about a couple creating a multi-colored ice igloo and decided that was the structure I wanted to build.

I got everyone I knew to start collecting those 2L milk cartons and stored them in my apartment. After they started to smell a little rotten, they got relocated to outside.  After about half a year I had about 40 milk cartons. My initial guess put the number of blocks at 400 or so and I tried to devise an ingenious method of reusing these cartons.

Important note…..milk cartons can only be used once. I attempted to tape them and insulating them but no matter what method I tried, the cartons would always tear along the seam.

Eventually myself and a whole lot of good friends managed to get a system and soon we were a ice-block making factory.

The first block were the most difficult but when you get in the hang of it, it is not all that bad.  The smell was terrible and my sink has never forgiven me.  Some people didn’t rinse out their cartons…not naming names…and who knows what was growing in these things.

With a few back of napkin sketches and some nifty logistical issues, we managed to get some blocks to McGill and lay the first foundational stones. I didn’t have a wheelbarrow and had to use my rolling recycling bin to get them to and from campus.  Many a people gave me weird looks as I wheeled the very heavy and loud recycling bin about 2km to school.

More block were placed on the base and soon a shape emergey out of my imagination on out from the ice. The mortar was made from snow and water.  I used some snow gloves with waterproof kitchen gloves underneath which worked pretty well but did ruin my gloves.

The arms were made with some particle board that we placed in with some dowels. It worked much better than I thought though the displacement from the weight made where the hands would be drop by a few inches.  I feared that the sculpture would tip over but everything held up until the spring.

To make the innushuk less lonely I put some Christmas lights as a necklace.  You can see the final form with me there as scale in the picture below.

If you want to see more pictures you can find them an imgur.