trying to get a jump on New Years this time
I don’t have a photo of my 2025 ice sculpture design, so we’re stuck with line art again for now. In fact, since I won’t likely carve any 2025 ice sculptures until late December and the design will become useless after 12/31, there will probably NEVER be a useful photo here :/ If YOU carve this though and get a good pic, I’ll put your pic somewhere in this post and give you credit!
updated 5/16/24: fixing text leftover from last year
my 2025 ice sculpture design for New Years
Before this, the last New Year’s number design that I posted might’ve been for 2014. It’s been so long that I don’t even remember anymore. So even though it’s still early right now, I’m trying to get a jump on making sure that I have New Year’s taken care of, since I’ve done so poorly for so long.
Anyway, the 2025 ice sculpture design that you see below is one of a few options for your New Years Eve or New Years Day ice sculpting. I’ll try to add more alternate design variations sometime in the coming months. One would hope…
this sculpture is the basis of the 2025 (and beyond) design. I did this one for a New Years Day brunch.
the template for my 2025 ice sculpture, as usual, doesn’t show the base. Also missing is the small piece of ice with the bubble details that elevates the sculpture slightly. You can probably figure that part out on your own.
Rosewood font, sort of
I’ve basically decided that as long as I can keep at it, I’m going to make this post where the New Year’s Eve year design is located. I’ll just update it each year, getting rid of the useless old year designs and adding the new ones.
Of course, you can also do that yourself. All you have to do is replace the last number or two. Reworking the outline isn’t terribly difficult; kind of just a pain probably. But to help you out, the font that I use is called Rosewood. Rosewood is a very decorative font, but I generally toss the decorative elements and just use the number outline. See below how Rosewood looks in the wild. I think it’s kind of an Old West look? I’m not sure 🤷♂️ Definitely old timey. Apparently, I never use it as it was intended.
If you’ve seen many of my ice sculptures or ice sculpture designs though, you’ve probably seen me use Rosewood before. I even used it in a live demo that I did for New Year’s Eve at a casino in Baton Rouge. I was freehanding the numbers, so they didn’t turn out all that clean, but you can still see some Rosewood in there.
I freehanded most of this live demo sculpture, include the Rosewood-ish 2022. I did NOT, however, freehand the logo. I used a template and carved it in my freezer. Then I covered up the logo with snow and did a “reveal” (meaning I scraped off the snow) at the end of the demo.
next year, no extra charge
I have a tendency to get distracted. Or life gets in the way. Or something. Knowing that, I’ve included the next year’s design as well. So I have a little buffer in case I get hit by a truck and am in a coma for a few months. When I get a chance, I’ll add a couple more years for an even larger buffer. (I could be in the coma for a while…) You’re welcome!
it won’t be long before this 2026 design template is replaced by a 2027 or 2028 version. Time marches on, relentlessly!
there's another way to carve this
It’s fairly obvious, looking at the design, that you could also make this by carving the number and the section for the line of bubble detail near the base out of your slab of ice. Then you’d take an extra piece of ice and make the “Welcome” section, then freeze it to the top. Up to you how you approach it; either way works.
how about on your CNC machine?
Uh, yeah, duh. I’m doing this sculpting on my CNC. My hands have made enough number sculptures for one lifetime and I doubt I’ll be doing any more by hand unless it’s a live sculpting performance like in the 2022 pic above.
One note in particular on the CNC version of this design though. There are two small lines below the “Welcome” sign where the sign meets the number outline. You have to extend those cut lines longer than you would think, because the .5″ bit that you’re probably going to used to cut the sculpture outline can’t get into that tight corner. This is a common problem that you have to compensate for with CNC designs; this design just happens to offer a good example.
but wait, there's more!
You can find more New Years ice sculpture designs on the design page. I also put together a roundup of all the New Years designs, which will get updated as I add more in the future.
