Mallori Reed from Grace Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma brings us this cool Christmas atmosphere. (originally posted January 2016)
Throughout the auditorium, Mallori strung around 2000 Christmas lights with ping pong balls attached. She found the technique through Pinterest. She bought around 1500 ping pong balls off Amazon and simply used a box knife blade to cut a small opening in each ball. From there it was just a process of pushing the lights into the balls.
They didn’t really stick to any plan when it came to hanging them. The randomness quickly became magical as they would walk the design after each light strand was strung. They carried the same design out in their church lobby, but with colored lights.
For the stage, she started with three 18-ft Christmas trees. After hours of flocking and re-flocking, they brought in the fake snow. The burlap was from a previous Christmas stage. She really wanted layers of the material to create almost a woodsy atmosphere. She simply cut the material without an outline to ensure each piece was different. The burlap was staggered in its layers on 2 different poles. The center burlap is pretty much what was left, and then adding the Christmas lights really topped it off. The stage and auditorium took about 5 days to complete for 2 people.
They spent:
$100 on extra Christmas lights.
$60 ping pong balls
Burlap and trees were already owned.
How long did it take to poke holes in 1500 ping pong balls and put the lights into them? That’s a really awesome idea but sounds like it would take forever. Is that included in the 5 days?
That’s a really cool look that the burlap made. I thought the sides were like white muslin fabric with how well they lit up. That’s cool that the burlap worked like that.
Really great lighting design on stage. I love how the trees were able to the separated from the rest lighting wise.
Hi Chris,
Honestly the ping pong balls were so thin,
You had to be very careful not to crush them when attaching to the lights. But the poor quality made it SUPER easy to cut a small hole into many balls in a short amount of time. If you can find a good pandora station, and get a system going, they will be done before you know it! :)
-Mallori