by Dot Cannon

Twenty-two days remained until the 127th Rose Parade®.

During a visit in early December, Fiesta Parade Floats’ Irwindale facility was humming.

Staffers welded, applied foam and discussed the practical aspects of creativity–for a finished work that would weigh multiple tons, could be more than 100 feet long and travels at a speed of around two miles per hour.

As the largest professional float-building facility in the Rose Parade®, Fiesta Floats will be providing eleven of the floats going down Colorado Boulevard on New Year’s Day.  The 2016 Rose Parade® is themed, “Find Your Adventure”.

Some of Fiesta Floats’ 2016 creations include:

“Adventures in Real Food”,  for Real California Milk (their inaugural float in the Rose Parade®!);

“America the Beautiful”;

“The Beauty of Adventure”, for Kiehl’s;

and Dole Packaged Foods’ 2016 entry, “Soaring Over Paradise”.

Now, of course, these “underpinning” photographs can’t come close to doing justice to the finished product.  What you see here is only the beginning.

As Fiesta Floats project manager Beverly Stansbury explained during one of our earlier visits, a float starts with a prototype, made in foam.

Then, the framework is welded together, foam is applied and the shapes are painted, to indicate what colors go where.  But the really intricate work starts next week.  Starting on Sunday, dozens of volunteers will arrive for “Deco Week” and cover every inch of the floats’ surfaces with organic materials.

So, a figure on a finished float will look a lot more like this.

Everything you see on a Rose Parade® float, Beverly explains, has to have been part of a living plant.  So, you’ll see seeds, coffee grounds, leaves and other plant-related materials.

And the process of attaching them is slow and painstaking.   Seeds get glued on, while flowers are put into tiny vials to keep them fresh throughout the parade and float-viewing afterwards.

According to the Tournament of Roses®’ parade application form, the average Rose Parade® float costs approximately $250,000 to design and construct.

(Fiesta Parade Floats is the top award-winning float builder in the Rose Parade®.  They’ve won the top prize–the Sweepstakes Trophy, for most beautiful entry–for the past twenty-two years.  The past five of those have been for the Dole float–a win every year since Dole Packaged Foods entered the Rose Parade® in 2011.)

2016’s Rose Parade® will be a poignant one for the staff of Fiesta Parade Floats.   Their renowned float designer, Raul R. Rodriguez, passed away in February after a long illness.  Fiesta Floats’ Facebook page describes Raul as a “friend and colleague”, and “a member of the Fiesta Parade Floats Family”.  (Raul had designed more than 500 floats in his lifetime.

In a 2013 interview, we asked Fiesta Floats Vice-President and floral director Jim Hynd to what he attributed Fiesta Parade Floats’ consistent award-winning record.

Raul’s name was the first part of Jim’s reply.)

Today, Fiesta Parade Floats’ 2016 Rose Parade® designs carry on Raul’s legacy.

On the day we visited, Beverly said they hoped to have Raul’s husband, Robert Cash, riding one of the floats on New Year’s Day.  In all probability, he’ll have Raul’s blue hyacinth macaw, Sebastian, with him.

And let’s hope the spectators give them some warm applause, as Fiesta Parade Floats, once again, demonstrates the magic.