Shiny Stacks

Lisa Rogers from Corner Point Church in Godley, TX brings us these cool light stacks.

This was their Christmas/Winter stage. The light poles were made from plastic bowls from the dollar store. The idea came from a Martha Stewart page using paper Chinese lanterns beside a pool. They wanted something a little less casual and more sparkly and decided the bowls would look perfect. Their original plan consisted of a couple more poles on each side and no crosses. But the crosses were already on stage and they decided they looked nice with the light poles so decided to leave them.

First they made bases by using two 1X4’s cut 24” long screwed together as an X. They added two small pieces of wood —about 3 inches on bottom ends of top piece to make stable. Then they screwed a PVC end cap onto the center of the X. The 2”ID PVC came in 10’ lengths, so they cut them in various lengths (8’, 7’, 6’ which gave them a, 2’, 3’ 4’ length to use also). They simply put the PVC pipe firmly in the end cap. They did not glue it in place. Next they used a 2-1/2” hole saw to cut holes in the bottom of the bowls. The plastic was pretty brittle, so it was necessary to drill slowly or the bowl would crack.

Then they stacked bowls on a pole to see how many it would take and they measured out their lights so they would be evenly distributed and used small pieces of tape to mark them. Example: they were using 10’ light strings – and there was going to be 3 “balls” of light – they marked the light string in thirds. They used a single strand up to 6 “balls” then they strung 2 strands together for the taller ones. It was a pretty tight fit getting the lights through the holes in the bowls over the pole so they assembled and glued as they went – first strung the large plug end through the hole of a bowl, and then they put the bowl on the pole.

They wrapped the lights around the pole to the mark, then added the next bowl upside down so it formed a ball. They hot glued the two bowls together and then assembled the next ball. At first they were gluing the bottoms of the bowls together also (ball – to ball) but found it was causing some of the tall ones to lean if they were not perfect, so they discontinued that and only glued the tops of bowls together. That way they were on the poles kind of like giant beads. The top bowl was an undrilled bowl. They added white fiber tree skirting to the bottom of each pole for Christmas.

The crosses were large wooden crosses they already had, covered in aluminum foil.

The PVC came from Home Depot and was donated along with the wood by one of their parishioners. The bowls came from The Dollar Tree and were of course 1 dollar each. They showed the bowls one Sunday a few weeks prior and asked everyone if they could to get them a few bowls when out shopping. They wound up with enough to finish their project. The lights were reused from a previous stage design (Milk Bottle Christmas).