Are you familiar with the Rose Parade? Every year my family would watch the Rose Parade in all its glory. Never mind the Rose Bowl which happens on the same day. Who needs football when you’ve got a magical festival of flowers? The floats have to be completely covered with flowers or natural materials like leaves, seeds, or bark. In addition to floats, there are marching bands, equestrian units, and a royal court. Guys, this is an American pastime! Naturally, we had to create a Rose Parade tablescape since we did one for the Macy’s Day Parade!
Gather your girlfriends together to make mini floats covered with brightly colored flowers! The floats line the center of an otherwise all-white tablescape in honor of the “White Suitors” aka: all the men and women who volunteer and make the parade possible wear crisp white uniforms. This is a classy occasion, folks! It’d be great as a New Year’s Eve dinner or a brunch on the day of.
FTD was kind enough to provide all the beautiful flowers (like this bouquet!) to transform our floats with! So start prepping for the new year, because a Rose Parade Tablescape is the best way!
Get the full how-to for the Rose Parade Tablescape!
Rose Parade Tablescape
We turned to FTD, the artisan-designed, florist delivered, floral gifting company who is the official floral partner of the Tournament of Roses. They’ve been affiliated with the Rose Parade for over 60 years! As a parade sponsor, FTD decorates the antique automobiles which carry the Rose Parade VIPs down Colorado Boulevard including this year’s parade Grand Marshal Gary Sinise, the Tournament of Roses President, Mayor of Pasadena and the Rose Bowl Hall of Fame inductees. They provided us with flowers in every shade of the rainbow to assist us in creating our floral floats.
Rose Parade Tablescape
Materials:
- Paper mache, wood, or styrofoam figurines. We used the following:
- paper mache unicorn (this one is awesome too!)
- wooden house (found in the bird house section in your craft store)
- paper mache dinosaur
- paper mache star box
- Oasis Floral Adhesive (these are the tubes we used and we went through 8 of them)
- Plenty of fresh flowers to cover your floats! (we used flowers from FTD)
- Styrofoam discs or rectangles for bases (we used 12“, 10” and a 14” and cut down two of them into rectangles with a knife)
- Washi Tape rolls for wheels
Instructions:
- Once you’ve collected all your materials, it’s time to get those creative juices flowing! Pick a color scheme and start to plan out each float.
- Use individual petals, full flowers, and leaves to cover the entire surface of each float. You can either apply glue to each petal or directly onto the figurine and then add on the floral. The glue works best if you squeeze out a bit and then wait 10-15 seconds before attaching your object.
- Cover the base of each float with flowers and then adhere rolls of washi tape on the bottom for wheels with some tape.
- Place a red rose on each plate with a white name tag.
- We chose to keep the place settings fairly simple with white linens and plates so the floats were the stars of the show!
We hope this Rose Parade Tablescape helps you ring in the New Year! Flowers for all!
Like that?! We do a tablescape a month. Look here for our favorites!
Thank you, FTD for providing all the flowers!