I worked on two statues during my undergrad at Tech, both with for the Student Entertainment Board. My 3rd year we had near record amounts of snow and there was enough snow to build our 9 foot tall groundhog head (it's not a gopher, damnit) just around our site.

During the winters that Houghton had while I was there a group could fill their form, go out for dinner and fun for a couple hours, and then come back and have a huge block of almost ice. But this year the air was barely below freezing as the night began. I'm sure most of the All-Nighters never really froze before they were judged and all the statues suffered.

After the snow and water has frozen you pull off the wooden form and start to shape the statue. The statue is roughed out with hatchets and spades and other sharp implements. When the statue is structurally close to it's intended form you stop hacking snow off and start slushing snow on. You slush a statue by making buckets of slush (snow and a lot of water) and smoothing the slush over the statue, building features on as necessary. The slush is made with pure white snow so you're building a shiny white layer on the statue. Once the slush has frozen, the last step before passing out (judging is at 8am, hurry!) is glazing the statue. You glaze with a clothes iron. The iron melts a thin layer of snow which then quickly freezes, creating a really nice shiny layer of ice. SHINY! Don't forget the frozen jello letters describing your statue with a nice rhymed couplet. (no kidding!)

We returned to campus and Carny had gone to shit. Some people were still working on statues, but a lot of people had given up and a lot stopped before really finishing their statues. The temp had risen to 11 degrees above freezing, making most of the detail work on statues impossible. Sad.