That's right, I'm coming clean. The Swedish store which is the envy of all our small spaces has found a special place in my church stage. It always has. I'm not sure if it's the cute pictures that explain how to screw the thousands of pieces together, or the fact that the products last almost as long as my attention span. I just love Ikea. The beauty is almost exclusively in the low price of everything. When I walk in to the blue and yellow utopia I practically stifle shouts of, "YES, I'll take five of everything!!"
Last week I think I did buy five of every lantern to create our new stage set. This will carry us through the summer with a general theme of light and bright summer colors. Honestly, this stage rides a little too close for comfort to my personal guidelines of keeping it neutral and non-distracting. Just like our approach to worship styles, performance, and music selection my goal is to inspire and add to our worship experience while minimizing the attention on the band. With pops of bright red, chrome and a drum riser this is further then I will go in the future! Thankfully the lamps warm up the space and make it more bright and cheery than distracting.
My staging budget is only $100 per month, so changing every quarter allows me $400 per set and we've never exceeded it thanks to Ikea and a resourceful team.
It's been an uphill road over the past two years building the worship arts team at Grace. Seeing more and more talented artists come forward and offer their gifts and time to engage our church in visual worship with each big project makes the long weeks so worth it. After finally finishing this involved set of engineering how to hang these panels from other panels, one of our associate pastors texted me Saturday night at 10pm. He asked me if the panels on one side were supposed to be on the floor of the stage. Answer: no. Thankfully my sister Linsi was in town visiting and after a long night of re-engineering how to fasten our panels we made them safe for Sunday.
There are two 1/16" inch cables running through pulleys fastened to angle iron on the top of the the white panels. This allows us to hang props more efficiently. Our new challenge was fastening the styrofoam lantern panels to the cable which is done by glueing two furring strips to the back of the styrofoam and running the cable through eye screws screwed into the furring strips. We crimped lead fishing weights to the cable to stop the panels from sliding down, but they didn't hold. After it fell we screwed the cable to the furring strip which seemed to do the trick.
My mockup ended up being pretty close!
