Stage Designs

Growing Foliage

Theresa Brandon and Nate Parker from Willow Creek Huntley in Huntley, IL brings us these towers of Coroplast foliage creeping up their screen on the back wall.

This design was originally supposed to be sheaves of wheat to tie in with Willow Creek Huntley’s Easter branding. It was designed and built by Nathan Parker, Technical Director, and Theresa Brandon with help from Suzanne Parker.

They first tried making the individual pieces in pointed shapes, but then decided they liked the rounded shapes better. They were made out of pieces of Coroplast, 6″ x 48″ bent into a curve. They used a Coro-Claw Flute cutter to make the long cuts. They cut small wedge shapes from 2″ x 3″ lumber and then fastened both ends of the Coroplast to the wedge using a washer and screw on each side. About 10% of the wedges would split when they drove the screws in so they made sure they had plenty of extras. They found that some of their older Coroplast wouldn’t take the curve and would snap into a point because it was more brittle.

The individual elements were arranged into “heads of wheat” with 6 – 8 elements fastened together with white small zip ties front and back. After they had them hung up in an arrangement similar to the original sketch, there was a last minute decision to change them to a more branching design. So they brought them all down and zip tied them together into longer elements and re-hung them.

noid-562297_449760951767411_1670721768_n

noid-photo_(2)

noid-photo_(5)

noid-photo_(6)

noid-photo_(8)

noid-Untitled-1

Thin Lines Cloud of Witnesses

5 responses to “Growing Foliage”

  1. Not really my style, but impressive! I like the thought process that went into it! Good job.

  2. platypibri says:

    The world of coroplast just exploded for me. Thanks!

  3. steve clemmer says:

    What thickness coroplast did you use, and how were the heads of wheat hung from above.

  4. Theresa says:

    Each side of the set was hung with two pieces of tie line – tied about 8 pieces in from the end of each branch so that the top pieces could curve over naturally. The smallest branch was self supporting.

  5. Nate says:

    The coroplast was from a company called Inteplast 4 mm Corrugated Plastic Sheet 4’x 8. We used a Coro-Claw cutter to very easily cut along the flutes of each sheet and divide it into the necessary sizes that we needed.

Leave a Reply to Theresa Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.