Wedding DIY-Part II: Place Card and Holder

From experience, I have discovered that DIY’ing is a great way to save money on wedding details.  Eventually, I plan to post about money-saving things we did for our wedding, but we’ll get to that in a different post.  Like I said in the last post, we didn’t have to do a lot in terms of decorating because the space was beautiful, but I did want to add a few decorative and personal touches to the wedding.

DIY Item 1: Place Card Holder

These little beauties were fairly simple to make and fairly simple in concept, but I think added a special touch for the place cards.  I would have been happy with people seating themselves, however we had a choice of meals and had to distinguish who picked what meals.  Thus, the necessity of place cards.

I got my idea for the place card holder from this Martha Stewart wedding website.  The place card holders were made of a large board cut into three large pieces.  Martha Stewart suggests using foam board, which probably would have been easier, but we already had the boards in our garage.  I sanded the boards and painted them gray (one of our wedding colors).  Then I ran the ribbons across the boards and glued them with leftover E-6000 glue.  While this seemed secure enough, I added some extra staples with a staple gun just to make sure.  (NOTE: Check the size of your staples before stapling.  Mine peeked through a bit and I had to cover it with ribbon.)  And VOILA!  As my students would say….easy peasy.

DIY Items 2 and 3: Place Cards and Programs

When planning our wedding I forced myself to be intentional about asking two questions throughout the process: Will it be something people will remember? AND What order is this item in my list of wedding priorities?  We had a few splurge things (the venue, my dress, and the honeymoon in particular), but the rest we tried to be mindful of our spending.  With that in mind, I wanted the programs and place cards to be nice, but they weren’t on the high priority list.  Thus, the DIY.

In a previous post, I mentioned how Pinterest is a beautiful thing.  Well, the internet is a beautiful thing, too.  I found a template for programs from a Google search and here’s how they turned out:

I only have pictures of the front, but the inside was similar with the same emblem on the corners.  Though the picture is in black and white, the color on the program was actually gray to save on printing costs.  The only thing I changed was the font, the headings, and inputting our names and wedding information.

I also decided to use an image from the wedding programs for the place cards.  The place cards were very simple to make after I figured out the dimensions.  I formatted them on Word, and though there was probably a better way to do it, it worked for me.  I made a table on Word and the cells were 4 1/4” by 1 7/8”.  The font I used was Commercial Script BT (one of the ones that comes with Word).  If I were better with fonts, I would have had more of a range, but alas, fonts are not my forte.  On the front I had the name and the emblem and on the back I had the table number.  Finally, I put a strip of Washi tape (ordered from Etsy and eBay) to designate a ham or chicken dinner.  For the tape colors, I used navy blue damask, dark purple, and vertical blue lace Washi tape rolls.  These, coupled with the place card holders ended up as a nice touch to our wedding decorations.

For more wedding DIY, see my Washi Tape coasters and centerpieces.