Happy New
Year, I am writing you from Pasadena California where the New Year’s
Celebrations have been in full swing for a few days now. Many of you reading this are just as in love
with DIY projects as I am, so when my Dad said we needed to plan a trip to the
Rose Bowl Parade I was all in! Watching the parade on T.V. is already
incredible as these floats are all too beautiful, but let me be the first to
say that the behind the scenes and making of these ginormous beauties is even
more mind blowing than the floats themselves!
Not only did we come to watch the parade, but we came to volunteer our time in making the Lutheran Hour float. This year’s theme was #findyouradventure (and this is exactly what we did.) As we were led into the building my previous thoughts and ideas of what would be waiting inside were… small… to say the least! I assumed that in this huge building there would be one float and all the volunteers would be placing flowers and fluffing baby’s breath. Turning the corner my father and I were immediately asked if we were ok with climbing scaffolding, as 10 floats came into view. Hundreds of volunteers surrounded floats doing anything from dry painting with glues, rice, and petals, cutting flowers and placing them into vials, grouping baby’s breath, daisies, and carnations on toothpicks to be stuck in the foam like structure. We immediately jumped right in with others from all over the country....after we gawked a little bit and took a few hundred photos.Our first project was making beautiful arrangements on boat/side waves and it didn’t stop there. By the time our shift was over my dad was helping instruct our side straight from the float leader, bringing in flats of flowers, fixing, tweaking, climbing, sticking, fluffing, and on and on. Lisa the leader of the float has one awesome job and probably one of the most stressful ones on the last night before declaring the completion of the float. (8:30 a.m. on the 31st is the last moment you can be working.)
As
amazing as this room was, my Dad, who had been going off to get more flats of
flowers pulled me away saying, “you have to see this.” He led me out into a
different area of the building and as soon as I saw what was in front of my
eyes my face lit up (I probably looked like one of the kids being led into
Willie Wonka’s candy chocolate river room.) The Flowers went on and on even
after thousands had been placed on their floats.
The size,
the beauty, the team work, love, and planning that goes into this parade has us
moving this item from our bucket list to things we would love to do again!
If this looks like something you would love to do there are many organizations you can volunteer through. You can learn more about those soon on our blog. This is defiantly an adventure worth taking! Thanks for reading and Happy New Year.
Stay Sweet,
Amanda Lauren
2 comments:
wow!! This looks so fun and so amazing! How wonderful you were able to do this!
So much fun!!! Thank you for your post......love, love it!
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