String Lights are Simple, and Simple is What Customers Want
Work in the party and event rental industry long enough, and you’ll come to realize that your rental business isn’t just dishing up party tents, folding tables and chairs, or fun inflatables.
What you’re doing is offering your clients an experience. You're creating an atmosphere that will serve as their event's backdrop. And one of the most imperative skills in creating a stunning atmosphere is knowing how to hang string lights the right way - in a way that creates ambiance, beauty, and good vibes.
Event lighting can be a complex subject. You’ll see everything from small candles on folding tables to elaborate laser light shows more breathtaking than a Radiohead concert. But it’s rare that clients booking weddings or birthday parties will want anything like that, so we’re not going to get into complex DMX lighting rigs or fog machines here.
Instead, we’ll start a little simpler: the string lights, lamp posts, and globe chandeliers we sell at Tent and Table are much more common in our industry than the industrial grade, Pink Floyd-worthy stage rigs we mentioned earlier. And you can set them up pretty simply, too, without needing light mixers and miles of heavy cables.
Let’s Learn How to Hang Outdoor String Lights
Globe string lights are extremely simple to hang up, especially in a party tent, thanks to their easy hooks. The globes easily latch onto your tent’s sidewall ropes or onto separate strings.
A pop-up tent, frame tent, or high peak tent will be the easiest for hanging up globe string lights, because of their internal frames. Simply run some string or twine along the underside of the frames, holding the string in place with cable ties or more lengths of string tied off. Then, all you have to do is hang your globe string lights by their hooks wherever you’d like.
Pole tents don’t have internal framing, so you’ll need to attach your globe string lights to the sidewall ropes. Alternatively, you might run string or rope between the tent poles and hang your lights from there. Just be careful not to interfere with the tent’s structural integrity.
How (and Where) to Hang String Lights Strategically
If there’s one rule we should observe while learning how to hang outdoor string lights, it’s this: don’t overdo it. Outdoor string lights should accent your party tent, patio, deck, or porch. They're decorative items. They produce light, but you don’t want to use globe string lights as your sole source of illumination. Instead, just use enough string lights to make the scene attractive and to establish a mood.
Globe floor lamps and chandelier lamps are not only great because they look good, but because they tend to produce more light than globe string lights do. Globe floor lamps can be set up in corners to fill a party tent with light while still contributing to the atmosphere. Chandelier lamps are ideally set up in the centers of high peak tents and frame tents. Couple these with your decorative string lights and you’ll create a beautiful, well-lit functional space.
The key takeaways:
- With globe string lights and other outdoor string lights, less is usually more
- Globe floor lamps work best in corners or set up along tent poles
- A chandelier lamp looks great in the center of a high peak tent or frame tent
- Try to strike a comfortable balance between beauty and illumination
Practice makes perfect, and learning how to hang outdoor string lights is a skill that will grow over time. We hope this guide gave you a decent understanding of how to hang string lights in your party tent. As always, please feel free to comment below or give our sales team a call at 1-716-832-8368 if you have any questions!