---

In December, we put up a stage design for the weeks before Christmas. It was a simple design with big impact — lots of positive compliments. Ironically, the “simple” design ended up being way more work than we anticipated!

As usual, I first sketched out the design in Adobe Illustrator.

I told everyone to ignore the scale of the garland, as I just used some artwork I already had to give the idea. The drawing looked like large fuzzy green caterpillars had overtaken our stage, but it was just to show that we were going to put garland on the top.

I kind of had to throw together the design in a hurry, knowing that we didn’t have a lot of time to work on it because we would be in full production mode for Christmas Eve. So I used items we already had — lights, fabric, garland and trees. The only thing that was new was a piece of gold fabric.

The design looked pretty easy, but ended up taking a ton of time because:

1. Our lights didn’t all work so we had to troubleshoot.

2. The lights got all tangled up so we had to redo the hanging to make them even.

3. The gold fabric wouldn’t hang like I had pictured so we had to readjust it in multiple configurations. In all it took probably about 4 man hours just to adjust the gold fabric so it was right! This was because we have a manual system of hauling up and down the cyc booms that we tie the fabric to, so we would adjust the fabric to how we thought it might hang, then haul it up. It would look terrible and we would have to redo it again. And again. And again.

In the end, the best way was using griff clips and natural-colored jute twine that blended in with the fabric. Looks so easy.

The first Sunday, one of the string of lights went out and we couldn’t figure out why, so we didn’t use the lights behind the white fabric at all.

The other weeks the lights worked and we had the full effect we were looking for.

Here’s a closer look at the stage.

We ended up ditching the garland. We didn’t have enough and the stage looked festive enough without it!

Supplies used:

• White voile fabric (3 pieces)
• Gold voile fabric (1 long piece)
• Strings of Christmas lights
• Griff clips
• Black rope (to attach griff clips to the ceiling)
• Natural jute rope (to tie up the top two corners of the cloth on either side of the cloth. This made the cloth drape more pleasantly than griff clips.)

(Hmm… now I noticed that the fabric matches the color of our wooden communion table. Looks like it was planned that way!)

1. Silver and Gold | Church Stage Design Ideas

   February 10, 2012 at 6:01 am

   [...] natural-colored jute twine that blended in with the fabric.You can check out her whole process on her blog post.More from CSDI's Editor: 5 ways to know what you're above average at. – on JonathanMalm.com Meet [...]