Alright, so some people may be a bit confused by this if they're not aware of it already, but in my hometown (Zundert, the birthplace of Vincent van Gogh), thousands of volunteers work together to build the world's biggest dahlia flower parade each year! No one is getting paid for any of it, and the parade has been going on for over 80 years now, minus the years of WWII. And yes, I'm not kidding when I say it's world's biggest flower parade:
Big, right? :]
Well, as you may have guessed from the amount of photo's I've used, I'm part of the Heikant workgroup, one of the twenty workgroups which build floats for the parade. The parade itself is held on the first Sunday of September each year, and the monday after is a day where the floats are on display for another day before they're broken down on the Tuesday after. The building season officially starts with the Strawberry festival held in June each year (some groups starting earlier though), when the scale models for all of the floats will be on exposition for those who are interested (and which is one of the main attraction points for the festival too!)
The flower parade has no set theme, so all of the designers are free to do with the designs as they please. This year, our workgroup will be building this design:
I will be helping out during this building season as well, so I've decided to post my experiences about the building season here from here on out, so if you're interested in how floats like these are built, you can keep track of this topic! I'll regularly update this post with some stuff that has happened, although the topic will be most likely more active from June/July on out as I'll be more able to contribute in building as well. I'll also occasionally post photos if possible, so you can see what happens too!
I'm super excited to be talking about this again this summer, so I hope you're looking forward to future updates :]