Fiesta Shoebox Floats

We’ve been in Texas for a month now. Have y’all heard about Fiesta San Antonio? I had no idea what Fiesta was until I went home and Googled it after being asked to make two shoebox floats for my boys for school.

FIESTA SAN ANTONIO

Fiesta is a huge 10-day celebration in the city of San Antonio. The celebration takes place every year at the end of April, and wraps up with the whole city of San Antonio, (pretty much) closing down on Friday for the Battle of Flowers Parade. This parade is to honor the heroes of the Alamo and the Battle of San Jacinto.

The Fiesta San Antonio website has a lot of interesting information about the celebration and history of the events. One thing I found really interesting is, The Battle of Flowers Parade is the only one in the country to be planned and directed completely by women! So cool!

We had our first taste of this beautiful celebration, and we loved it! There were even cascarones smashed over our heads. IYKYK.

SHOEBOX FLOAT SUPPLIES

If you buy through one of my affiliate links below, it won’t cost you a penny more, but I do get a tiny commission. That means you get great, vetted supplies AND the satisfaction of knowing you supported an emerging artist today. #win!

Shoebox or small box
Wheels – these worked well for us
Tissue paper
Scissors
Pom Poms

A FIESTA SHOEBOX FLOAT

I couldn’t find much information or inspiration on what a Fiesta Shoebox Float should look like, so I thought I’d share what we came up with and maybe it will help spark something for someone else needing to make one.

We were told it should have a theme, but the theme can be about whatever the children like. Ours are created around what our boys are into right now – Mickey Mouse and Dinosaurs.

Basically, you are creating a mini version of a parade float, similar to the example below.

BUILDING YOUR FLOAT

You will start with an old shoebox or small box. I wanted our floats to have a back to them like some parade floats do. However, our shoeboxes didn’t have detachable lids, so I just cut a small piece of cardboard from some of our moving boxes for each float.

Next, the boys helped me wrap the shoebox with some white paper that we had on hand. Then I used hot glue to attach the cardboard backs to the shoeboxes, so this part I did alone. I also used hot glue to attach all of the characters and dinosaurs. The hot glue held well for their parade but didn’t damage the toys. It just peeled off after I removed the toys.

The boys really started having fun after the bases were built and the characters were glued down. Up until that point, I don’t think they understood what we were doing.

TISSUE PAPER WILL BE YOUR BEST FRIEND! It’s forgiving and can provide a lot of texture and coverage pretty quickly.

Once the base was built, we moved the float bases down to our art table, and really, we just glued on A LOT of tissue paper. Sometimes we rolled it over the end of a straw to create little flowers. Other times we twisted it and glued it down, or made little balls. Any kind of texture works. We also added several pom poms, streamers, and little flowers too.

My kids are two and three, they did a lot of the hard work gluing tissue paper onto the bases. This project took several weeks to complete. They’d work on the floats a little bit every day until they got bored – sometimes that would be 2 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes. Overall, it was a lot of fun!

We also added wheels and a string to pull the float.