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Downtown Dover’s held its inaugural Fire and Ice festival on January 17th and 18th – welcoming the world of ice sculptures to the state capital.
“This is our first attempt at a Fire and Ice [festival] and we're very excited to be working with DiMartino ice company from Jeannette, PA.” said Diane Laird.
Laird says she worked with DiMartino representative, Jared McAlister, to bring in the chill event to Dover.
“It takes about four days to create a block of ice, crystal clear, you can read a newspaper through it. Then we just design the ice sculpture based on whatever design we think up or whatever design is requested,” said McAlister.
“Each sculpture is comprised of multiple blocks of ice. They’re all different,” he added. “Some are ten blocks of ice, some are four blocks of ice. Some of the smaller ones around town are one block of ice. A block of ice weighs roughly about 300 pounds.”
During the to day festival, ice sculptors did live carvings for all the large ice blocks found throughout Loockerman Street.
“So we stack them together with a lot of special equipment, lot of custom-made equipment that we use: chainsaws, Japanese hand saw blades, a lot of tools that are custom-made by other people of the industry, a lot of modified equipment specifically for ice carving.”
The sculptures from DiMartino were placed all around Downtown Dover and are likely to stick around.
“People will see ice sculptures, over thirty. Of the smaller ones, they range from a key to a parking meter and a sunflower. Anything you can imagine that can be sculpted in ice,” said Laird. “The festival sculptures will be from the Dover Public Library, all the way to 120 S Governors Ave. The ice sculptures will be up until they melt, and we believe that’s going to be for some time. I would guess that some of the larger sculptures will be up for at least another week,” said Laird.
If you want to be part of a future festival, reach out to the Downtown Dover Partnership’s planning committee.