St. Patrick’s Day Parade 2007

Continuing the countdown to the Raleigh St. Patrick’s Day parade brings us to our 2007 entry.  We co-opted the musical group Daniel Harris Live (starring Daniel Harris and Eric Doyle) to play on the float and covered it with hot-glued green balloons. A miracle of modern engineering it wasn’t but it does qualify as the most talented float we’ve ever entered into the parade. This float was also the first to have a fully functioning sound system on it. It was a huge step forward from the previous year and is still extremely unique in our floating history.

The design of this float was largely accidental. The concept was to hot-glue close to 1000 balloons to the trailer to leave the illusion of a green cloud. Conceptually hot-glued balloons seems like a great plan. Logistically it was a nightmare. It is easy enough to do but the balloons require the right amount of air and you can’t touch them with the hot glue gun – the tip will make them pop.

A critical piece is making sure they are adequately fastened to the trailer. As we learned on Tryon Road leaving the house – they will fly off the back of the trailer if you haven’t done this correctly. Fortunately we we able to get everything back together and make it work. We lost a few balloons along the way but overall the plan worked.

This was the last float to fly under the ARTMUSIClife.com banner and represented the last time we operated without a real theme.  It is one of the most memorable floats for the build team because of the increased level of difficulty caused by the balloons.