It's Lantern Parade Time

Dalmatians 

It's time for the annual Mount Holly Lantern Parade. Well, okay, the parade is not until October but it is time for us to start building our lanterns. For the third year in a row, Imagery will have an entry in the parade under the "community" category. The pressure is on as we have taken first place the past two years.

This year's theme is "Heroes and Villains", so that offered an abundance of opportunities for sure. We decided to go with "101 Dalmatians" since the story contains both heroes and villains. There are a lot of families with children who attend the parade, and we felt like they would get a kick out of seeing the Dalmatian puppies. I don't think we will have 101 of them, however! Let alone trying to build that many lanterns, we would struggle to find enough volunteers to carry them the night of the parade.

A small group of us have begun making some puppies because we will have a lantern-making workshop here in the community next Sunday night. It's an opportunity for new neighbors to see what we are up to, and hopefully recruit some volunteers. We will also get a jump on getting some puppies constructed.

We will have four stations at the workshop, and will have completed lanterns at each to show the process. The first station will construct the lanterns with wire, the second will add lights to the lanterns, the third will glue the specialty paper over the lanterns, and the fourth will add the black spots to the Dalmatians.

My specialty is stringing the lanterns with lights, so I will man that station. I did the structural wiring of two puppies in preparation for next week, and I really did not enjoy the experience. I'll leave that to the wiring experts and stick with lighting. One thing that is nice about lighting is that I can bring the lanterns home and do it in front of the television.

lit Dalmatians 

There are a lot of logistics to work out, but we have a very experienced core group working on this so I'm confident we will have a great-looking entry again this year. And the crowd will ask, "Who let the dogs out?" Who, who, who, who, who!