Last year (the end of 2006) my parents and Heather and I signed up to help decorate Rose Parade floats. We had such a good time that we decided to do it again for this year's parade. It's really a lot of fun. We got to work on the Lutheran Hour float again this year, which is a small but beautiful one. The first part of the day was a lot of sitting around cutting the petals off of dried flowers, which was pretty boring. Then, because there was nothing going on at the Lutheran float, we got moved over to work on the Long Beach float for a while. But soon we went back to our original float and, due to Heather's persistence (go Heather!) we got to do a little work up on the scaffolding, putting pink carnations on. We spent most of the rest of the day doing that, and finally moved to the Farmers Insurance float (the really tall Indian, if you watched the parade) to help them out for the last 45 minutes.It was, once again, a really fun experience, even if we did get half high off the glue that was everywhere and our fingers were sore from forcing toothpicks into foam on the carnations. We'll definitely do it again for the 2009 parade, but we think that waiting one more day and going on the 30th instead of the 29th would be better, since then we'd probably get to work more with the fresh flowers rather then the dried flowers.
This is what the warehouse looked like when we got there. Our float is on the left. By the time we left, the lion next to it had the most beautiful mane.
Our float before we started working on it.
Heather and me up on the scaffolding, our favorite part of the day.
Our float toward the end of the day. That's our handy work on the pink and yellow carnations. Very artistic, yes?
I spent 45 minutes pinning these pine branches to the Farmers float, which was quite enough. They were a pain to work with.
Buckets of seeds and flower petals used for the details on various floats.
Heather and me with Jack, the donkey on our float. Isn't he cute? He had a sign on him that said DO NOT TOUCH JACK! Apparently, being touched was not in his contract.
3 comments:
I always wondered what type of person would be patient/detail-oriented/insane enough to glue all of those little flowers on. Now I know. Nice job.
Also - isn't it a little late to start Judah on his Guiness drinking? We snuck some into Jenna's bottles at 6 mos, although she's more of a Coors Light girl.
It was actually hard cider... and you're right, we should have started him earlier. That way he might have slept once in a while.
There are entirely too many jokes to be made about a donkey named Jack.
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