Mini Parade Float

Our town puts on a huge Christmas parade every year at the beginning of December, and this year my husband was going to be in it as part of a group driving their RC cars in the parade.  Well, a while ago he got his hands on a car trailer for his RC to pull and asked me to make a mini Christmas parade float on it for him to pull.  The parade's theme this year was "the Sights and Sounds of Christmas" and when I thought of the sights of Christmas two things kind of came to mind.  Outdoor Christmas lights displays (one of my personal favorite parts of Christmas), and a living room with a fireplace with decorated mantel and a Christmas tree with lots of present under it.  So my two possible float designs were a "yard" full of light up decorations, or a "living room" with a fireplace and arm chair and tree with lots of presents under them (with lights on the tree and mantle garland of course).  For this one I really wanted an adult figure to sit in the chair and some kids to sit on the floor and wave to the crowd, but finding dolls or figured in this scale (1:10) that would work for this scene proved to be pretty much impossible.  I really couldn't decide between the two designs though, even with not being able to have the "people" for the living room float the light display float had some cons too (mainly the logistics of making mini light up yard decorations in the time I had to do it and the expense of the amount of lights I would need, when our budget was already really tight this fall...... although it would have looked REALLY cool, so I'm keeping the idea on the back burner for the possible future).  My husband really liked the living room idea though, so we went with that for this year.  (If they do it next year though, depending on the theme it may be lights lol).

This technically isn't the first time I've made a mini float.  A few years ago we started a tradition (that we actually have ended up not doing for the past year or two, but hopefully will get back into this year) of having our own mini Rose parade on New Year's day.... except ours is the Sweet Pea Parade... (The real Rose Bowl parade is my absolute favorite parade... and I love parades lol).  We would make floats to fit the real parade's theme and since it was in miniature (and winter, and we weren't trying to go broke making them) we decided that we could use artificial flower parts in place of real plant material, but other than that the big parade rules applies, that everything had to be made from/covered by "natural" (or fake plant lol) materials.  It was a really fun thing to do, so I do hope we actually do it again this year, but I'm getting a bit off topic here lol..... So while technically not my first mini parade float, it was the first one I was making to be in a real parade.

I wanted it to really be like a scaled down version of a life size float, so in planning the float I had to first think about how I would decorate a life size float (fortunately I have some experience in that too lol) and then translate that to miniature.  So for exmaple, rather than making a super realistic fireplace forn the mini float, I made it out of cardboard and drew on the bricks myself, as I would do on a full size float.  The "wall" behind the fireplace and the floor of the float were "plywood" (basswood), with the back wall painted with gloss craft paint in a manner to look like someone bought a gallon of paint and painted it in life size.  Stuff like that.  So, not a fireplace you would put in a dollhouse, not a perfectly finished wall, but exactly what you might see scaled up on a real float.  The tree was a bottle brush tree that I upgraded with Princess Pine to make it look real, and the "tinsel garland" on it was tinsel pipe cleaners (which were perfect!).  I actually found scale christmas lights at Michaels (I thought the only option I was going to find would be either the type with the little dot on a wire - which I did use on the sides of the float) or the type with a tiny bulb, but really long back to it, so I was super excited about these). They aren't a bright as I would have liked but they looked great on the tree, and the mantel.  The mantel garland and the garland on the side rails of the trailor and the wreath above the fireplace were tinsel garland that came off of a christmas tree shaped ornament from Dollar Tree that I pray painted to look like miniature faux greenery (they had the perfect sized little flat "needles" like real faux (haha) greens do).  The presents were ornaments from Dollar Tree (which I thought about re-wrapping with real wrapping paper, but coulnd't find any with small enough print and then decided that for a real float you might wrap boxes in bright shiny wrap anyway), and then of course I had to put a dollhouse on it lol.  Oh and the chair I threw together real quick from foam core board and fabric..... not my best work because I used hot glue for it (I was really running out of time lol), but it worked well for the float.  The tree skirt and stocking I just cut from felt and  glued together.  So without further adieu, here are the pictures.......... And also a little video of it in the parade at the end (there's no sound on it just fyi, so no, there's nothing wrong with the sound on your computer/phone/tablet lol)

working on the fireplace..... this was really the only thing I got in-progress pictures of lol...

the finished float.... although in retrospect, probably somewhere without so much distraction in the background would have been a better place for pictures.... lol

attached in place behind the Hubster's RC truck