And so it begins...

Tonight we had our first Canoe Carnival 2006 meeting. What is Canoe Carnival? It is a festival, particular to our little town. Every summer, we take two canoes, wrap them in plastic so they can't take on water, put a 16 x 20 foot aluminum platform on top of them and build some sort of ridiculous float on top. About 15 groups in town do this, then on the first Saturday in August, we parade them around one of our lakes after sunset, they are judged and someone wins. It's a huge party all summer, involving lots of beer, wine, food, water, power tools and bandaids. We joined a new float group 2 years ago and this was our float from that year. "King Tut" was our theme, our music was the song by Steve Martin and my son played King Tut and danced on the float all the way around the lake. I made his skirt...along with a camel who spit water, but is not in the picture!

Last year our theme was "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". We had everything from Lucy to the newspaper taxi. Our Tangerine Trees had a little problem though. They were about 20 feet tall and as they were paddling around the lake, one of the trees hit a branch hanging over the lake, and as you can see in the second picture, it is not quite as tall as it started out!

We will be determining our theme for this year's float at our next meeting and it will be kept secret until we put the float on the lake in the last week of July and others can see it. Tomorrow I promise I'll post something quilty...just wanted to share our little carnival with you!