“People told me I wouldn’t be able to do it, so now that I am doing it (ice sculpting), I think that’s the most rewarding — to take a dream that people have told you is an impossible dream and have it come to life,” said Scott ‘Iceman’ Miller, who turned his dream of being an ice sculptor into a reality after being released from his last job as a chef on Feb. 19, 1993. Miller, who now owns his own business from his home, Miller Ice Sculptures, started when working at Country Club of Lansing in 1981 when the manager asked him to help with an ice sculpture. “It was always a dream to do it full time,” Miller said, “I was released from my last job and decided to pursue this full time.” Miller now creates frozen spectacles from his studio at his home in Lansing , where he makes 300-pound blocks of ice to be transformed into works of art.
Scott Miller doesn’t mind the freezing cold. In fact, this week’s warming trend has him a bit concerned.
If he’s going to create ice sculptures this weekend at Hats Off to Lansing, part of the city of Lansing’s sesquicentennial celebration, Miller would prefer to see temperatures drop back down to the mid-30s.
“If it’s just warm, and we do ice for weddings where it’s just room temperature, the ice will last six to seven hours,” Miller said. “But if we’re talking about being out in the sunshine … whatever rays they are get into the ice and break the bonds in between the water molecules so the ice kind of falls apart and it crumbles. It just doesn’t melt, it crumbles.”
Miller will be carving ice live at Hats Off to Lansing at 1 p.m. Saturday, making this the third weekend out of the last five he has spent carving ice at festivals and small demonstrations in the area.
Last weekend, he carved sculptures in Williamston and Perry. The weekend before that, he was at Harris Nature Center, 3998 Van Atta Road, in Okemos, carving sculptures during a winter festival.
“This year we’ve been very busy because we’ve had winter back. Before that it kind of died out because we didn’t have winter and it would be (warm) on the weekend and businesses weren’t interested in sponsoring something that wasn’t going to be around the next day,” said Miller, later adding that most businesses like to keep the sculptures around for a few days or weeks if they can to draw in customers.
Getting started
It was Miller’s first job working in the kitchen at the Country Club of Lansing, 2200 Moores River Drive, that eventually brought him to the world of ice sculpting. After an employee in the club’s main kitchen failed to show up for work, Miller filled in and eventually was given a position in the kitchen full time, a promotion from working at the pool’s snack bar, which was due to close down.
After that, Miller said he bounced around to different positions at the country club and eventually landed at the City Club of Lansing, 213 S. Grand Ave. There, he worked with a chef who was an ice sculptor.
“He was a culinary (school) grad,” Miller said. “When he asked for help I was the only one who said they would help. The first one was a vase and he did most of it, but it was so well received and I kept getting these pats on the back that I said, ‘Oh, I can do this.’ I was hooked.”
From there, Miller’s passion for sculpting took off as his boss let him take on more projects.
“In the beginning, he let me do them for a fundraiser or when they were free basically, but if one of the members wanted it, he would do it so then I watched him,” Miller said. “After a few years, I was good enough, people weren’t coming into the room standing on their head trying to figure out what it was. Then he didn’t want to do it anymore and so I just started doing it.”
Carving out a business
As time went by, Miller had honed his skills enough that people were starting to take notice and wanted to buy his sculptures from him directly, prompting him to consider if this could become his career.
“I had done enough ice and I was selling them outside of the country club before I left there and the dream kind of started there that maybe I could do it full time,” Miller said. “So I was looking into doing that before I left the country club but there were enough who I thought were experts in the field — you know, other chefs — and they said, ‘No you can’t do it in Lansing. There’s not enough ice.’ So I said, okay, I’ll just be content to do it as a side thing and I’ll cook.”
But it didn’t quite work that way.
“I was doing two or three dozen a year while I worked there in addition to my job there,” Miller said. “And I was turning down about that many that I wasn’t able to do. So I was already looking to doing full time.”
Today, Miller owns and operates Miller Ice Sculptures. His garage is his studio, equipped with all the tools he needs to create his sculptures. The machine that makes the 300-pound blocks of ice uses a continuous current of water to eliminate air bubbles from the ice and allow it to freeze from the bottom up. This, Miller said, is important for creating structurally sound blocks of ice.
When he began, Miller used a handsaw to carve. Now, power tools, ranging from the drill-like tools that carve out the details of his sculptures to the machine he uses to lift the blocks of ice, have made his job easier.
“For some reason, this year people have been reminding me … that they knew me then and how hard it was in the beginning because I didn’t have any of that equipment,” Miller said. “And it used to take a couple of us and we’d put it on a dolly and you get that end and I’ll get this end and we’ll take the seats out of the van.”
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Before owning his own ice-making machine, Miller said he used one at a local Holiday Inn and then hauled the blocks back home to work on them in his garage.
Future projects
Eventually, Miller said he wants to work on sculptures with more permanence. He eventually wants to start carving wood, a desire sparked by carving a sculpture from a dead tree in his parents’ yard a few years ago. For now, he’s content to keep sculpting ice.
“There are times when I come home and I pull in the garage and I see all the stuff that I have and I remember,” Miller said. “I just can’t believe this is how I’m making my living. I’m carving ice for a living. It’s like I get to go play and it’s for my job.”
