Cool lighting effects for $20-$50 a piece!!

Hey, just a couple of ideas I'm willing to share with you and your ministries.

Lighting. It's something that's either taken for granted or it's under-used. You would not believe how much lighting can change the entire atmosphere of a room. Let's talk about special lights. You know, the cool lamp in the room, the awesome centerpiece, but you don't need to break your budget to get some cool lighting fixtures!

1) Rope Lights.
These will become the most versatile set of lighting in your ministry. Rope lights are useful for EVERYTHING. But don't just slap them on a wall and call it cool. Okay, it grabs attention, but unless you do it right, it just looks sloppy.

Here is a cool trick I learned with Rope Lights!

FOAM NOODLES: These are the coolest thing since sliced bread. You can swim with them. Cut them in half and give them to a cabin full of ADHD boys and just let them beat the tar out of each other without injury then watch them be ready for a nap around 10am. Cut them into rings and play games. They are awesome.
A while back I was purchasing a bunch of foam noodles to put around my room. I would slice them straight down the middle and put them up like pipework in the room. A woman who helps out with our senior Pastor's company, "Laugh Your Way America" had stepped in and checked out what I was doing. She saw some rope lights I was going to throw out and then suggested, "What if you ran them through the noodles?"
Woah. Mind=blown. I didn't even think about it. So I had to figure out the best way to string them through because some ends caught on the noodle, but I figured it out. Plugged in the rope lights and the noodles glowed so bright!! So I strung more ropelights and more noodles and viola! Cool lighting.

Here's a picture of how they turned out.

My next project that I'm working on will utilize old Christmas Lights. I'm making a centerpiece for our game room.

Here's what I'm using:
Cube Wire Shelving
Chain Links
4 1' metal chains
Christmas Lights

You know those wire shelves that you piece together with plastic connectors? Place anything too heavy and the whole thing comes a tumblin down? Here's a better use that what they were made for!

I have a bunch of these squares lying around. I'm going to make a grid of 6x6 of these. Don't use the plastic connectors though. I will use 3 chain links to link them together. Then I'm going to do a 2nd layer that's about 2 chain links on top of that and grid it out to 5x5. Then same distance in links and 4x4 and so on until I have the last row of 1x1. Then you take your christmas lights and string them throughout the whole thing in a tangled mess. LED lights would be the best since they don't generate a lot of heat. When I'm done I'll have a sweet pyramid of these hanging from the ceiling. Now, I have a metal beam that runs across the center of my ceiling which I will be attaching these to. This whole thing could weight as much as 50lbs and you don't want that tearing anything down and landing on kids. That is also why I'm using chain links instead of the plastic connectors. I'll post pictures when I'm done.

Anyway. Just use your imagination. You can do some really cool things for cheap if you just take the time to use what is around you!

That is all for today! Enjoy!

-Eric Riskus