Christmas Designs

Shimmery Christmas

Mike Woodard from Lake Hills Church in Austin, TX brings us this glittery, shimmery Christmas stage design. (originally posted October 2014)

For Christmas last year, they had the challenge of building an elegant set with a not-so-elegant theme. Their service was built around the presence of various Country Music musicians that were their guests for the weekend. Going “Country” would have been easy to do. But…they didn’t want the set of “Hee Haw”. Their solution was to give a nod to rustic winter concept but add some elegant touches.

They began with an LED star drop that they rented from a scenic company. That was a large portion of their stage design budget. After that, most of the other things were fairly inexpensive.

In front of the star drop, they hung a white shear. The reason they did that was to be able to wash the back wall in color and change the look of the “sky”.

On the ground, in front of the star drop and shear, they bought a bunch of flocked Christmas trees from Walmart. The trees were placed on platforms at various heights to make the trees look more organic in their arrangements. To cover those platforms, they used bags of hay to build the foundation of their snow-bank. They covered the snow-bank with white fleece that they found at a local fabric store. It was on sale for $1.20 per yard and the whole thing cost around $60. Then they sprinkled iridescent fake snow on the fleece to give it some shine and texture.

One of the coolest things that they built were the “light sticks” that they added, hanging out in space to the left and right of our screen. That had been a space that they have tried to ignore in the past, but adding these light sticks upped the “elegance” factor. They built the light sticks by taking a 6ft piece of all-thread and attaching a threaded eye-loop at the top to use to hang them. Then they got strands of mini Christmas lights and tightly wrapped them around the all-thread. They used 2-100 light strands per 6ft stick. Then they hung the light sticks from the eye-loop. These looked so good flanking the stage that they made some smaller 2ft versions that they hung in the trees lining the walkway to their worship center.

photo 1.JPG

photo 3.JPG

photo 4.JPG

photo 5.PNG

Twinkle Pallet Trees Humble King

3 responses to “Shimmery Christmas”

  1. Daniel says:

    How do I get George R.R. Martin to come play guitar at my church?

  2. Kristen says:

    Were the light sticks plugged into something in the ceiling? How did they turn them off and on? Thanks!

Leave a Reply to Kristen 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.