Float!

It's Mardi Gras time. And this means: Parties. And that means: Shoebox floats.

Our friend Charles puts on one hell of a spread on any occasion, but on Mardi Gras, the stops are removed and he goes completely past the edge of sanity. And it's great!

As part of the festivities, there is a Shoebox Float parade. This year Sherri and I decided, we were In It To Win It with the best damn float we could put together. We've been working on this thing since December really, and are very proud of the result. Presenting Kap'n Kirk and his Krewe in "Landing Party- Bead Me Up Scotty!"




Impressive, no?

So how does this start? It starts with passion and commitment really- Charles puts himself out there so much, we felt like we had a duty to put just as much into it as he did. Plus it was a hoot.

So after much brainstorming and looking around the house, we settled on what I call the "inspiration piece"- the item that serves to set the tone for the project- our Kirk talking bobblehead(shown here with a necklace made of pipe cleaners):



So after removing the batteries (the talking was getting on our nerves) we had to figure out what else to do around him. And the answer was obvious- a captain has to have a krewe! To E-Bay! Fortunately, $24 and a Buy It Now button got us this:



Yeah, we were going to cut it open and 'ruin' the value, but I have some thoughts on Collectibles. First- anything that says 'Collectible' on the box... isn't. Second, the thing is only worth $24 now- no one is retiring on that.

Anyway, From there we did a test-fit:


Success!. Now- were we doing a Ship scene or a planet scene? Tough call, until we found these:

Planet it is!

But then this happened:


So that's a fail. They never got going.

No matter- we are committed! We'll address that problem later.

In the meantime, how will we affix the Krewe to the float? How will we get the beads to stick? Millions of things to consider- time for a POC testbed box:


Ok- we have a lab to test everything, we have a Kirk and krewe, we have a glue gun, pipe cleaners, a box, wrapping paper, beads, and no rocks. Anything else we need? Oh yeah- this:

a battery operated string of green, yellow and purple LEDs:

Ok- now we Make!

First- we need a star field:

then we wrap the box, and A Stroke Of Luck/Inspiration: the Rocks can be rock candy (grape and lime)!

So we pick some up, and here's a test fitting:



Sherri noticed that every float always has some fringe hanging down to cover wheels of the old clunker the float is built on- so...


And every float has a sponsor and theme:

Time to add some rocks:

But that's boring. How about we do something with those LEDs?


Much better. For the infrastructure types, here's what the bottom looked like at this point (extra holes are for the figures). The lights are just held in by friction- the holes are just big enough for the light but tight enough they don't need any glue. We only used 3 of the LEDs (one green and 2 purple). The others are just tucked away.


So we have signage, fringe, glowing rocks (!) and a starfield. Time to add some flora:

And some Fauna:

Next we wanted to trim it with beads. The idea was to have a straight border of gold beads and a bunting-type run of purple beads under that. This is tricky, because the hot glue gun only gives you about 15 seconds of work time, and we really didn't want huge glops of glue. After some experiments, we decided the best method was to tie the two bead strings together at predetermined spots with thread, then glue it up as a single unit.

And with the beads AND the back on:

The back was looking a bit plain though, so we decided to do something about that:


This was a long and tedious project, so as you can imagine the gang got just a bit silly:

Bones did let his temper get the best of him though. But to be fair Spock was pulling that same gag in every shot, so it was getting on everyone's nerves

In the end- Success! A pretty, pretty float and we won. So all in all, not a bad month's work.