The circus is coming!!

Yesterday the zombies won.  There were no cupcakes.  There was no blog post.  Today will be better.  Today is about the CIRCUS!!  Everyone loves the circus... lions and tigers and bears.... oh my!

                                                   

The circus does not come here.  My friend and I decided to bring the circus to us.  We entered a float in the May Day Parade.  This is our second float now, and it is SO MUCH FUN!!!  

To start out planning a parade float you need a theme - CIRCUS.  Got it.  Then you need to plan the big stuff.  Trailer/truck/volunteers.  Thankfully my good friends Jo and Sue from joandsue.blogspot.ca know all the right people.  

We decided to try for a tent on the float.  We used a 9x9 gazebo type sun shade.  It was wider than the trailer so some modifications were needed.  Thank goodness for small town friends with tools!!  We used plastic tablecloths for the side tent panels, alternating red and white.  We just secured the top of the tablecloths around the bars and then gathered them like curtains.  We then put the fabric top on the tent.  We secured baby giraffe to the centre of bars with a zap strap.

Now we needed a some smaller decorations to fill in the ends of the float.  I made a lion cage from a kids wagon.  I covered the sides with poster board and circus stickers from the dollar store.  The bars were rolls of clear basket wrap that I did not even unwrap... looked amazingly like bars.  The top was cardboard, wrapped in another plastic dollar store tablecloth.  A yellow tablecloth was cut into strips and made into fringes. The kids all wanted to play in the cage.  B even asked if he could sleep in it.  I had to hide it until the parade.

Next we needed costumes.  There are a lot of performers in a circus.  It was my job to round up all the cute kids in town and get them to be on the float.  That was easy!  Next year though we are planning the float at Halloween so we can get costumes then.  It is harder to round them up in May.  

We had amazing helpers - thanks to Nick and Kenzie and Taylor.  You are awesome!

The cool thing about a circus is that you can hand out anything - balloons, candy, popcorn, cotton candy.  There are endless possibilites.

I packaged up the cotton candy in ziplock bags decorated with circus animals.  Amanda gave up her morning to make balloon animals. 

Jo created Gerome, an amazing paper mache giraffe.  Tutorials are on her site.  Just wait until to you see her paper mache from last year!  She also made the strongman weights.  

We gave the kids on the float silly string and confetti poppers.  They LOVED them.  They did give one spectator a minor heart attack by setting one off as they were walking by.  Oops.  Sorry about that sir.

They are kind of loud.  

The grand finale was not one but TWO trophies.  Best Commercial Float and Best Costumes.  I can not wait until next year.  Maybe I can invent another holiday so we can have an extra parade. I will keep you updated on that.