Snow sculpting became a pandemic pastime

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This article was published 13/03/2021 (1906 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This past February was great for spotting snow sculptures, carved into yards around the city. I have even stopped to take pictures of a few, thinking no one would believe me. 

There was a life-sized dolphin in Riverview, a massive sphinx in St. Vital and, across from the North Kildonan Community Centre, I found an oversized family of snow people.

I met Derrick and Naoko Kennedy, who, along with their son Zen and daughter Luca, had been busy carving, using a new technique.

While I had always thought  you needed to have the perfect temperature for that melty, sticky snow in order to roll up a snow ball, Derrick and his amateur sculptor friend James have been perfecting a technique for packing snow during a deep freeze.

“Working with the snow is easier when you have it very cold because the snow sets up overnight and you can carve it the next day. In fact, the colder the better,” Derrick said.

“It’s easy. Get some cardboard and some ratchet straps and start filling it up, basically. My friend James got the idea from the wooden forms they use for Festival du Voyageur; he thought there must be a simpler way,” Kennedy said.

“The drive for building sculptures comes from wanting to get out of the house after a long winter indoors, but it brings a lot of smiles to people’s faces,” Derrick said. “One grateful neighbour dropped off a card thanking me for keeping the spirit up in the neighbourhood; some people stop to wave, they want to take pictures with Olaf.” 

“It made me feel like I was famous,” Zen said. “There were lots of people stopping.”

The character from Frozen came out of a form Derrick had built for his neighbour. “After we ran out of usable space, my neighbour allowed me to build on her lawn.”

“Mention that they’re all melted now,” Derrick said. “The big guy is really leaning, but you can see them online.” 

Derrick and Luca made a how-to video explaining the steps in building a homemade form. You can see in the video how cold it was by Derrick’s frozen beard. However, when I asked him about the cold, he said “the sun was shining, the sky blue, that was enough motivation for me.”

The video has been posted to YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWxZ_7JA6tI

Evan Comstock is a community correspondent for East Kildonan.

Evan Comstock

Evan Comstock was a community correspondent for East Kildonan.

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