Stage Designs

Stains All Over the Glass!

Kyle Gordon from Valley View Church in Louisville, KY brings us these great faux stained glass pieces. (Originally posted November 2014)

This stage design was from a night of worship they had called, Age to Age: A Night of Hymns, Songs, and Spiritual Psalms. The stage design for Age to Age was pretty simple. They wanted to go minimal but also really bring in a classic church feel to the stage. The best thing they could think of was to go with stained glass windows. Based on the size of their stage, they decided to go with six windows that would all be roughly four feet wide and eight feet tall. They would then spread these across the length of the stage.

Kyle looked online and really could not find anything that appeared simple and non-cheesy, so he decided to make it up as he went.

Materials needed:
• Six sheets of plywood (Kyle used the cheapest pressed wood he could find, roughly $12 a sheet)
• Wood stain
• Jigsaw
• Tissue paper (whatever colors you want)
• Laminating machine
• Three 2×4’s

Kyle wanted their stained glass windows to have an arching effect at the top. He drew his design onto the first piece of ply-wood. After getting his design down, he went to town with the jigsaw cutting out all of the holes for the windows and creating a window frame that was one solid structure. He focused on making the first window as good as possible because this would then be his stencil for the rest. Also, make sure you use the same stencil. As you go, each one will turn out just a little different because we are not perfect. To ensure the last and first don’t look really different, use the same stencil throughout.

After cutting out all of the frames, he stained them. Kyle would suggest not doing white (as he thought this would look good and started this way, it looked cheesy and he lost the wood effect). Another side note, if you do not want the wood look, an easier route is to just cut insulating foam sheets. These will not be as sturdy or durable, but definitely can be used for a one-time gig.

To make the colored glass, he bought different colored tissue paper and laminated them. The purpose of laminating them was just to make them more durable (as regular tissue paper rips easily). After getting them all laminated, he stapled them to the back of the window frames and used a razor to cut off excess. He also kept with the same color scheme throughout, but made each one still a little unique.

Next, he took the 2×4’s and whatever other pieces of leftover wood he had and built a base. His goal was to make sure that all of them stood up straight and didn’t fall. Once he got bases on them, he used sand bags on the back to weigh them down on the stage.

The big difference was now lighting them well. They used LED’s on the backside to light through them. This gave an amazing effect and throughout the night as the LED’s changed the windows looked different as well.

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Chandelier and Band Shell Bowed Stacks

3 responses to “Stains All Over the Glass!”

  1. Nana Egyir Hagan says:

    wow ! very creative

  2. Paul says:

    Just down the road a little ways at Ekron Baptist. Love the idea!! Great job guys

  3. Patrick says:

    How did you laminate the bigger areas in your stained glass? Did you have to outsource the lamination? I have some panels I’m building and it has some big areas that we are trying to figure out. We thought about starting with coroplast, putting the tissue paper on top of that, then the wood frame. You’d end up with a durable composite that would protect the faux stained glass and hopefully help it last for a long time. I’m not sure if that will be a good idea or not?

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