Battle of Flowers Parade unveils floats for 2013!

Nancy Hayne, (cq), helps out as Battle of Flowers volunteers help
decorate public school floats at the Battle of Flowers warehouse,
Thursday,  April 4, 2013.  The festivals features range from
Cinco de Mayo to Palio di Siena, a horse race in Siena, Italy.

In a warehouse off Interstate 35 and New Braunfels, a handful of Battle of Flowers Association volunteers in expensive shoes — Ugg boots, Christian Louboutin red-bottom heels, and studded Valentino flip-flops were just a few — were skittering across the concrete floor, armed with staple guns to attach big paper flowers to the 18 sparkling, towering parade floats crowded in the expansive space on Thursday afternoon.

“Traditionally, our floats have been made of chicken wire and we had to crimp the flowers onto the chicken wire,” said Donna Vaughan, the 2013 Battle of Flowers Parade chairwoman. “Now, we get to use staple guns, and it's just so much better. It's the little things in life.”

Staple guns were new this year because the floats are all new. This year marks the first time that the Lone Star Parade Float Co., headed by Clyde Watt, is creating the 17 floats (made of wood, not chicken wire) for the Battle of Flowers Parade. But it probably won't be the last year you'll see his work in this parade.

“Once we've done a parade, I don't think we've ever lost a parade, unless they just stop having a parade,” Watt said. “For the most part, when we get into a parade, we pretty well stay in it.”

That seems to be the case with Battle of Flowers already, actually. Last year, AT&T Pioneers, a volunteer network, commissioned Watt to create a Wizard of Oz float to run in the parade. It caught the Battle of Flowers Association's attention.

“We really liked his design; we liked how it looked, the sleekness of it,” recalled Vaughan.

Watt credits his success with the detail he puts into his floats. Many feature custom sculptures carved from Styrofoam and then painted and covered in glitter. In the warehouse, he points out a sparkling, multicolored dragon head on a Japanese-themed float, then lifts it up to show the white Styrofoam bottom; two glittering camels on another float, he said, were carved from 8-foot blocks of Styrofoam. His work is a time-intensive process; he estimates that his team has spent about 400 hours to complete each float.

“It's kind of a mass production-type thing,” he said. “We've been working on these full time since October, plus we have our regular parades. We'll do 30 Christmas parades, and Thanksgiving Day parades, and Martin Luther King Day parades; this Saturday is the Mesquite Rodeo Parade. So all those are still in production while we're working.”

These days, the Lone Star Parade Float Co. does about 126 parades a year, and now Watt can add the Battle of Flowers Parade to that.  Read more!