iLoveShelling.com 2012 parade sanibel

Happy 4th Of July! It was a beautiful day for the Junonia Jalopy to make an appearance in the Sanibel parade. And even more exciting was that our friends Susan (soul sister), Berringer, Jacob and Daron wanted to walk along side Clark and me in the Junonia Jalopy to show off their love for shelling too!

seashell costumes sanibel parade

So Susan and I had a blast making seashell costumes…

seashell costumes

We started by painting seashell designs on foam core board then cutting them out…

paint a junonia seashell costume

We made these to fit as a sandwich board type costume so we needed to make signs for the back side attached with ribbon (we found aqua ribbon with white stitching!) … so we made iLoveShelling signs and embellished them with a few shells of course…

shelling signs

We even found  aqua buckets to hold our shells that we handed out to the crowd. How cute are they!!

iloveshelling sanibel parade

 Since the theme was “Sanibel #1 Vacation Destination” from the Frommer’s rating in this year, we decided to remind everybody that Sanibel is #1 Shelling Destination too!

sanibel number 1 shelling destination

 Here are some other fantastic floats in the Sanibel parade like the Captiva Island Yacht Club float…

ciyc parade float

 Cip’s restaurant…

cips sanibel parade

 I loooove this float by Tammie’s Total Care!

tammie's total care sanibel

 Take a look at this huge castle on Congress Jewelers float…

congress jewelers sanibel parade

 Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum had their float sporting their Great Cowrie Roundup…

shell museum sanibel parade

Here’s Doc Ford’s float…

Doc Fords Sanibel parade

I wish I could have seen all of the floats because I heard there were so many creative ideas and lots of fun. Thank you Sharon from Cottages to Castles for sending me this photo of Susan walking the parade in her SAND DOLLAR costume… So cute!

susan sand dollar costume

We think we handed out around 700 shells this year. Now you know what we do with all of those shells we collect! Okay, did you notice something about the ALPHABET CONE Daron had on? Do you see letters?

seashell parade costume

 Thanks  Captain Brian for sending this last photo! Happy 4th!