What To Do With Stacked Chairs

We have a bunch of chairs we usually stack in the corners of our marketplace during VBS, just to get them out of the way.   When we did Rome we found a creative way to hide the stacked chairs under sheets, turning them into scenery.   (You can often get donations of old white sheets from hotels).

When we had an Egypt themed VBS, we found another way to use our "chairs."   We made "houses" out of them, and used these for our "Tribe Time" (which I believe was called "Family Group Time" that year). 

I liked how a colored piece of cloth looked like a lintel over the doorway (pictured above). A tribe sign also decorated each house.

Inside we made less effort to cover up the chairs (ran out of sheets).  We decorated with blankets and pillows for the kids to sit on, and various other knick knacks our tribe leaders brought.   Each tribe got a camp-fire for their room...something left over from the previous Wilderness VBS.

 

While they didn't look perfectly like houses, the outside was still a lot nicer to look at than stacked chairs.   

You can see two of our rooms in the corner of this picture...they looked nice with the marketplace tents.  We had four in total, one in each corner.   Having these rooms right in the marketplace made for less traveling (there was also two Sunday school rooms used, right outside our marketplace...but we didn't have to use rooms in our other building, which is a further walk). 

Rock Wall: Foam Board

Foam Board Rock Wall by Brian McGuire from Parkview Baptist Church in Monroe, LA.

To make a rock wall like the one pictured you cut "rocks" out of foam board and attach them to a larger sheet of foam board or wood (possibly even sturdy cardboard), and then paint them in shades of gray or brown.

Some paints, especially spray paints, will eat away at foam, so you will want to test your paint out before applying to a large area. However, you can also use this property to make foam board rock without having to do any cutting or gluing  You can paint around where you want rocks to be, which creates a grout like indentation when the paint eats away at the rock. Then you can paint the rocks that are left with non-eroding paint. There are some significant safety and environmental concerns to using this method though. Make sure to be in a well ventilated place when you do this, as the fumes can be harmful. Wearing a mask is suggested.

Foam board too expensive? You can use packaging foam, old or broken foam coolers, etc. Broken up, painted, and attached to a backing they can look great!

While the example above is fairly simple, you can get incredibly detailed with foam board rock by carving the foam...just check out the example below.

Picture provided by Hugs, Kisses, and Snot

You can find some more excellent pictures, as well as more detail on painting and carving techniques for this type of "stone" wall here. There's also step by step pictures of an amazing wall built for an Easter set here.

See All Rock Wall Ideas Here

Making a Rock Wall With Crumpled Paper

The rock wall above was created for Nazareth VBS at the First Baptist Church in Tuscola, TX.

It's amazing to think that the wall above was made with just paper, paint, and cardboard. The stones were made by cutting out different rounded shapes from scrap paper, crumpling them up, unfolding them, and spraying them with stone paint, gray paint and black paint. These were then stapled into the cardboard structure (made from refrigerator boxes!)

Photo by Kelly Moreland

Another church, for Rome VBS, made this stone wall with rectangular crumpled paper "bricks" with painted foam board stones for accents.

See All Rock Wall Ideas Here

Make a Rock Wall With Printed Paper or Plastic Party Rolls

This rock wall was created for Nazareth VBS at Dayspring Baptist Church in Waco, TX.

You can make a rock wall using commercial party paper, corrugated paper, or plastic party sheets. The house above is made this with party paper (though the rock around the door is foam board, made with the spray paint grout method described in a previous Rock Wall post). This is probably the quickest and easiest way to make a wall, though less three dimensional than some other methods. You can see some more pictures of party paper wall in use here.

Below are some examples of rock wall papers you can purchase (click on the image to see them on Amazon).  The first one listed is the one we used to make the house pictured above.

Basic Party Papers

 

Corrugated Party Papers

Corrugated papers are sturdier, similar to cardboard.  These need less support than the regular party papers pictured above.

Plastic Party Rolls

These plastic sheets are especially useful if you need a rock wall that can get wet.  The ones below even have a turret border you can add, and a ground floor (though unfortunately they don't sell the dirt by itself, without the wall, which would be nice for covering a larger area). 

They also have some other matching accessories which could be useful...

Vinyl Peel and Stick Wallpapers
While these are more expensive than party papers or plastic sheets, they seem simple to use, and like they would  hold up better to reuse than plastic sheets (though I haven't personally used these, so I can't vouch from experience for that).

Wallpaper Murals

Sometimes you want something more permanent   Wall murals are a bit pricey for something like VBS, but if you want to decorate a room with a rock wall for the long term, not just a short event, the extra cost of buying actual wallpaper might be worth it.  Here are some examples or rock wallpaper murals.

See All Rock Wall Ideas Here

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