The annual Gasparilla Pirate Festival in Tampa, Florida also includes a parade as part of the festivities. The parade takes place this afternoon, and usually features the Budweiser Clydesdales. But this year, instead they had local artist Terry Klaaren create a float using nothing by recycled beer cans. Klaaren called his work “re-cycle-dales” and it’s a sculpture of two life-size Clydesdale head figures that took him about six weeks and 3,000 beer cans to construct. According to a local news story:
“Every beer can was hand flattened with a wooden mallet,” Klaaren said. “We punched a couple of holes in it and then sewed it onto the mesh with stainless steel wire. I found beer cans to be a great sculpture medium.”
Gieseking said the vision for the float was Clydesdales emerging from a wave of water collecting recyclables in the wake.
“Just a nice image of taking the garbage out of the water,” Klaaren said.
Unfortunately, this is the only photo of it I can find. Perhaps there will be more views after the parade takes place later today.
Awalt High School’s class of ’74 had a homecoming float made entirely of beer cans. I believe it was in the shape of a dragon, and the cans may have been 100% Coors empties. If I remember correctly there was some fuss over the manner in which the beer cans had been emptied, resulting in disqualification from the float competition.
Three years later, another beer-related float by Awalt’s class of ’77, this one a rotating Budweiser can:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE7F9PwBi9E
…but that was made from crepe paper, which one assumes was not nearly as much fun to empty.