Which materials go where?Working from the detailed color drawing, a design team creates a decorator book for each float that shows what material goes where. Painters transfer the information from the decorator book onto the polyvinyl shell of the float, which tells the volunteers where to place each particular flower or seed. "Before it is decorated, the float looks like a giant paint-by-number picture," Zepeda says. Floats are decorated from top to bottom, with the volunteers putting the hardiest materials onto the float first and the most perishable ones on last. "Timing is everything," Zepeda says. The last section to be decorated is the float deck, or main floor, because it receives the most traffic during the decoration process.
Flowers are affixed to floats in various ways. Some, like roses, hydrangeas and irises, must be placed in individual water-filled tubes to prevent droop and death. Blooms that can survive without water, like marigolds, strawflowers and mums, are mounted on thin metal picks and stuck into floral foam. In a technique called "petaling," flower petals are stripped from the blossoms by hand and glued one by one onto the float. Dry flowers are often placed into blenders and reduced to a fine powder for shading sculpted forms on the float.
According to Zepeda, it takes 60 volunteers working 10 hours a day for 10 days to decorate a single float. Each float leader is responsible for the final quality inspection of a float. When the volunteers have completed their work, Zepeda will examine the float for slip-ups like visible glue, thin flower coverage and shoddy flower application. When the float has passed this final once-over, Zepeda says, "it’s off to the parade."
How do floats get to the parade?
The work isn’t finished once the floats get the float leaders’ okay. The 50-foot floats must be towed carefully from the outskirts of town to the parade route in central Pasadena, a 12-mile journey that can take from five to eight hours. "Mishaps happen," Zepeda says. The vibration of the road can knock things loose; the float can hit a tree or telephone pole; gusty Santa Ana winds can cause other problems.
To guarantee floats look as good at the start of the parade as they did when they left the barn, float leaders bring along a patch kit that contains a little bit of each material used to decorate the floats: flowers, greens, veggies, seeds and glue. "We usually end up repairing and touching up the floats all night long," Zepeda says. "We don’t get much sleep."
