Over the years, Agnes Boss has made many things: dolls, chests, a piano bench and dollhouses.

“I would try anything,” the Albert Lea woman said.

One thing she hadn’t built is a parade float — until this year, that is.

Boss, 85, was approached by Bev Jackson of the Albert Lea Art Center’s board of directors to build the organization’s float for this year’s Third of July Parade. The board had decided it wanted a float to look like Grant Wood’s painting, “American Gothic,” to go along with the parade theme of “Heart of America” and to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Art Center.

Boss started to work thinking about how to go about the project. She worked off a colored picture of the work, and drew plans to make the American Gothic home to scale so it would fit in the back of a truck.

Boss said she started with a very heavy type of cardboard and covered it with strips of wood to form the siding. “I used screen molding cut in half,” she said.

The glue held well, she said, but it also squirted out from beneath the boards when she put them on. So she had to clean away all the glue that squirted out.

Because she was adding weight to the structure by putting on the “siding,” Boss reinforced it with wood on the inside before covering the back with cardboard. She joined the wood Lincoln-log fashion and screwed it all together.

The gothic window on the parade float mirrors the window in the painting. “It has the appearance of old material, gathered at the top,” she said.

The posts on the porch in the painting are carved, so Boss purchased pre-carved balusters from The Home Depot and painted them white.

The porch floor boards are really the back side of some wood paneling Boss had. She cut grooves in the paneling to make it look like boards.

For porch shingles, she used mats for picture frames, cut them and painted them brown.

“Everything was all over the place,” Boss said of the materials in her basement workroom during the process. “I could hear Bert (her late husband) saying, ‘Agnes, put that away.’”

Boss credits her daughter, Suzanne, for helping her get the project under way by getting down on the floor and cutting the outline of the house out of the cardboard with a carpet knife.

While the project has taken a month for her to complete, Boss said she was glad she can help out.

“I wanted to do something really nice for the Art Center,” she said, adding she’s been a member for a long time.

Boss said she’s very pleased with the way things turned out. “It was fun,” she said.

The finishing touches will come on Friday, when Dick and Barbara Westurn will don period clothing and depict the upright Midwestern family in the painting on the float.

The float is No. 49 in the parade lineup.

After the parade, the float backdrop may find its way into the Art Center’s anniversary quilt show in the fall.