Pile o' Wedding: We All Scream for Ice Cream Edition

So, there are two schools of thought on the "Icecream at an outdoor reception  in July in Florida" debate. The first response is "Yum!" and is pretty standard. The second is "How are you going to keep it from melting?"

After a lot of thought, this is how we answered that:

Photo via Kimbe Photography

You'll need:
Wooden or galvanized tin buckets (We found ours on clearance at Tuesday Mornings)
Plywood
Chalkboard paint
Old pot lids
DRY ICE

Photos via Kimbe Photography

We made lids for the wooden buckets by cutting plywood into circles. We then cut a hole into the center of our plywood lids to fit the ice cream container into. Note: This works best if your ice cream comes in a cylindrical container. 

We painted our plywood lids with chalkboard paint, with the intention of writing the flavor in chalk. That didn't actually happen, but we liked having the option there.

We found three circular glass pot lids at a thrift store priced at $1.00 about two days before the wedding.  They fit perfectly. It was meant to be.

Dry ice can be purchased at many grocery stores, and can even be ordered online at relatively reasonable rates. Regular ice just won't work for this. It melts quickly, making a huge mess in the process and won't keep your ice cream frozen. Dry ice on the other hand, kept our icecream frozen solid through out the evening, and vaporizes into the air, leaving no huge puddles behind. Do a little research on safety measures (Basically: DON'T TOUCH IT), and it'll make all of your out door ice cream dreams come true.

And, don't forget the toppings!

Photo via Kimbe Photography

Mmmmm. Some old sundae cups from the closet hold sprinkles, pecans and gummy bears. While some oil bottles found at Wal-Mart hold Chocolate and Carmel sauce.

The ice cream bar was a success! Everyone was screaming for ice cream all night long. Well, some of us just hinted around and looked longingly until someone gave in and got him some candy all night long. Who can resist that face?

Photo via Kimbe Photography

Cost Breakdown:

$30.00 for buckets ($10.00 each)

$0.00 left over plywood

$0.00 left over chalkboard paint

$3.00 pot lids

$50.00 for dry ice (we could have been fine with half of what we got)

$40.00 ish for icecream and toppings

$123.00 ish TOTAL

We could have done better if we'd known we'd only need half of the dry ice we purchased, but other than that I feel like this was money well spent on something that I really wanted at the reception. Hey, if you can do better than that, let us know!

Linking this up to Show and Tell over and Blue Cricket Design. Click on over to see some awesome crafties!