Creative Chaos

I actually got this idea from another creative chaos blogger, and I sniped it and kind of did it my way. I don’t know if my way ended up cooler than Jim’s, but that’s life sometimes.

So I hit up the dollar bin at the Walmart and bought about 38 yards of fabric. I wasn’t sure how much I’d need or use, since I’ve never worked with fabric before, but I knew I was going floor to ceiling (almost) so I just got a ton.

I got some new cardboard squares and re-used some of the ones from my last design. I found pictures of weddings and couples fighting, blew them up to 300dpi in photoshop, made them black and white, printed them, attached them to the black cardboard squares. (Note: if you can’t afford spray paint to make the cardboard squares black, buy a few packs of black construction paper and just glue them down. You can’t tell the difference if you have a theatre light type setting.)

We hung the cardboard (now with photos attached) from the ceiling at various heights with fishing line and paper clips (we have a drop ceiling…paper clips work best so far).

The fabric (white and purple) is draped curtain style on the back wall. We used a staple gun and thumb tacks for that.

We lit the fabric with black lights and pink and purple gels (did I mention this is a wedding series? lol).

It’s not too fancy, but it was definitely affordable.

Here’s the series graphic:

PS. If you’re a church person who’s interested in doing a series similar to ours and you’d like to use the graphics, intro videos, etc. Please let me know. We give away our stuff for free and I’ll be happy to send you a CD w/ everything.

For more creative stuff, check out Creative Chaos at www.ragamuffinsoul.com.

Yikes.

There are only two reasons for people to come to church. Only two things they can get at church that they can’t get by sitting at home listening to preaching and worship. Relationships and Experience.

Ouch ouch ouch. I can create some sort of experience. I’ve been doing it for over a year. But how am I at relationships? Not good. Horrible.

I don’t even know if this quote is true. I haven’t thought it out yet, but I know that when I read it the air in my lungs left in a whoosh. It hurt a little.

Sometimes you have to stop doing and start listening. Stop creating and start connecting.

When you are naturally an introvert, how do you learn to love people?

I’m working on it.

Creative Chaos

So this week, we had a set change like we usually do when we start a new series. Our new series is called Faces, and the main idea of the graphic is a face profile in black, with a light background.

So, the set change. We had a local cardboard company donate several cuts of cardboard (4 27″ squares, 12 15″ squares, 10 10″ squares, and 10 7″ squares). I bought some regular spray paint (the H2O kind would soak the cardboard I think) in black, and spray painted all of the squares.

Next, I bought some tissue paper and cut it into squares smaller than the cardboard (like, for the 27″ cardboard square, the tissue paper might be 24″, etc.). I balled up the tissue paper to give it some texture, them smoothed it back out and glued it to the cardboard.

Next, we mounted the squares all over the back wall, symmetrically but still kind of random. Keep in mind that so far we’ve only paid for 3 packages of tissue paper and 4 bottles of black spray paint.

Here it is w/ no lighting:

Next, we cut profiles out of black construction paper and glued them to the biggest squares. You can barely tell they’re there in the pics, but they are and they show up in the room pretty well.

Next we added some lighting.

What we haven’t added yet (that is obviously not in the picture above, but it will be there by Sunday) are some shop lights on each side w/ black lights in them. The white tissue paper picks it up really well and it makes for a cool effect when we turn the other lights off. The 4′ black lights are 12 bucks each, but i have a gift card, and I borrowed one shop light and we already had one.

So there you go. Cheap, easy, and it’s just something fresh for the eyes.

For more creative chaos posts, visit the main page @ ragamuffinsoul.com.

Thanks for reading!

Set Change…

Here’s what I’ve gotten done in the last 2 days.

I had this concept that I wanted to do lighted fabric columns. I kept trying to explain it to members of my team, and I kept getting this blank stare. Haha I’m so bad at explaining visual concepts in my head because I’m SO visual, but unfortunately I can’t draw, so I usually have to make an example.

So, we had some white sheets from our set for ‘Burned.’ I bought these little crochet shape things at the Walmart that are 6″ around. I had to look up the formula for circumference and stuff, to cut the sheets to be the right size.

I’ve made pretty much the biggest mess you could imagine.

Once I had the columns cut I liquid stitched them from a rectangle into a circle. I had to let them sit for 24 hours.

Next, I threaded a string of Christmas lights through the column and hung it up. It looked good, so I did some more.

This is where I stand today at 4:10 PM.

You can’t see it from far away, the columns TWINKLE.

Here’s a close up to show you..

Even that isn’t capturing how neat they look.
There will be a total of 10 hanging.

Cost so far: about 10 dollars. We already had the sheets and the Christmas lights. I bought the liquid stitch, the plastic thingies, and some safety pins. We had fishing wire and paper clips, and some extension cords.

We still have a lot to do, so if this creative fun stuff is up your alley, let me know!

oh what a night

So last night I met Gabe and James up here to install….well, it’s kind of a secret. I mean, you’ll see it Sunday if you’re here.

Needless to say that when I got home I had to shower and I had ceiling tile remnants IN MY EYES.

I wasn’t the only staff member here last night. In fact 5 out of 6 of us were here VERY LATE.

Sorry for the lack of blogging and randomness this week. Busy busy busy.

I need some help

Ok, so I need a domain name. Something cool. emilythestrange.wordpress.com is not cutting it anymore.

It can’t be emilythestrange.com because that is taken by some silly clothing line.

So here’s the contest for the weekend. I will do one of two things for the person who wins.
A. Buy them a drink.
B. (for those that don’t drink or are too young to do so) Make you a sandwich.

Now don’t go taking this all lightly like it isn’t a big deal, ’cause whatever we all come up with is going to have to stick like, forever.

Give me a domain name.

the first real meeting

So last night I had a group of people over to my apartment to plan some creative stuff for upcoming series. The meeting went really well. This is what my TV looked like after they left at 12:30AM…

Stay tuned RidgePoint.
There’s good stuff coming up!

If you’re interested in being a part of the creative team, the “make the service happen on Sunday morning” team, or the host team, holler at me!

video shoot

So I told you guys that we were doing a little video shoot Friday night. Here are some pics I took along the way.

This was my backpack before I left the apartment. It just struck me as funny. I had a frying pan in my backpack. Who else gets to say that because of their job they carried a frying pan in a backpack?

My crew setting up. I use the word “my” loosely because the guy in the white shirt doesn’t exactly go to church here. Although he’ll probably work here someday. I keep pretending in my mind that someday I will get to hire a dream team of creative people. So I have a list going…

Tim got very creative with our lighting. He’s basically the man.

James (in the blue shirt) is my video guy. He is on Travis‘ blogroll.

Eventually we needed some cracked eggs, so we cooked them and had dinner!

yummmm.

The shoot was a blast and we had lots of help with Tim, James, and Ruth being the awesome people that they are.

I can’t wait to show you the video

Caption Contest

So this is from our honeymoon. We got home and started looking through our pictures, and we have no idea what Mike was doing. Like, seriously, we can’t figure it out. So give it your best caption and you will surely get a prize (and stop calling me Shirley!).

(Bonus points if anyone can figure out what he was doing)

Good Luck!

Congrats on your VD

Mike and I were driving around and I saw this sign and thought you might enjoy it.

Haha.