Special Event Design

Here’s to Hope

David Glowacki from Columbus First Assembly in Columbus, IN brings us this Light Bright inspiration.

This set was built with water bottles and Christmas lights. They started by building a 10ft x 4ft rectangle from 2×4’s and plywood. They asked their local recycling plant for water bottles. After a bit of puzzling…they held back all the water bottles and donated them to the church. They washed all the bottles, let them dry…then were ready to build.

After they built the frame they drilled 840 holes into it. The holes were spaced so they could use every bit of space on the board. To attach the bottles to the frame they used silicone caulking.

Once all the bottles were glued in place they marked out where the letters for the word “Hope” would be. They used 4 mini Christmas lights in each neck of the bottles they wanted to illuminate. To add some RGB mixing to the bottles they got creative. They ordered sets of red, green, blue, and white lights and stuffed four in each bottle. Then clumped them together and put them on dimmer packs so they could mix the colors however they wanted.

Total materials and costs:
Lumber/hardware – $50
Paint – $15
Bottles – Free
Christmas Lights – Around $600

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5 responses to “Here’s to Hope”

  1. Gordon Frost says:

    What a creative mind can do when there are financial limitations. This is an excellent idea and I expect that they are already planning on displaying more than HOPE. This is basically a reader board that could display almost anything. A little fooling around to make a computer interface and anything goes, including a crawl with long messages or simple graphics.

    Gordon

  2. Tanner peters says:

    Lol I know david and that guy in those pics. It’s our good friend Joel Paine woot

  3. Jason says:

    how did you hook the lights to dimmers is there an instructable to do it?
    love the idea

    • David Glowacki says:

      Jason the Christmas lights were plugged in to each other making one long strand and each strand a different color plugged in to a different dimmer channel on the packs. Altogether there are 8 channels total. 4 for the letters hope and 4 for the surrounding area. Thus giving us RGBW mixing abilities in both areas.

  4. Joel Paine says:

    The total cost was under $600. All of the strands of Christmas lights were a total of $350. There were 3,600 lights total on the board.

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