Singing Choir

This turned out to be a pretty sizeable project, and it takes two people to move it around because it's so unwieldy and heavy, but it's been a popular part of this display for quite a few years. I don't use it every year, but because it uses rope light, it's super-low maintenance and fills up a lot of visual space.

I came up with a concept while sitting in the choir loft in church one Sunday morning, and I drew a little sketch in the margin of my program

I found a graphic on the Internet that was close to the vision that I had for the choir, so I made a screen capture of that.

I needed a way to enlarge the relatively small graphic, so I used a digital projector to project it up on a wall. I taped several sheets of newspaper together as my "canvas" so I could outline the elements I wanted to make in wire.

I used 9-gauge wire from Lowe's that came in 50-foot spools. It's very stiff but bendable and substantial enough to weld, and it's rather inexpensive. I used two spools for all the elements of this frame.

Ping pong tables come in really handy for big projects like this! I laid out the paper, and because I wanted to make each frame out of a single piece of wire, I needed to know how long each wire should be. I used string and taped it onto the outline of each element and then used each string to measure the length of wire and rope light I needed. The string also provided good practice for determining how I would wire the frames with a single, continuous length of rope light.

After cutting and bending the wire into the shape I needed, I welded each piece together.