DIY Wedding Place Names and Menus

Are you bored of posts related to wedding crafting yet?!  Sorry if you are - I have been working on a long-standing crochet blanket project... so there will be other crafting to show you!

However, before my wedding is old news, I wanted to document the things I made for it.  I thought it might give ideas for anyone planning a wedding - as well as something I can look back on in future years!

I made all the place names for my wedding - 98 of them!  (Well, actually 100 as two guests couldn't make it and I found out in the nick of time to replace them with two others!)

I used this card* (*affiliate link) which is a lovely lightly hammered card.  It's hard to see the texture in my pictures, but it looked great in real life.  I was worried whether it would go through the printer ok - but I had no problems at all.  The print on the card was also nice and crisp and black - a better finish than on normal paper, I found.

I liked the idea of going for something a little different to the usual place names I'd seen - which were mostly landscape rather than portrait (wider rather than taller).

I also wanted to put everyone's menu choices on the back.  I know when I attend anything I usually forget what I ordered, so it's nice to have a reminder!  It also helped the catering staff when handing out the food.

The way I made these was to use Word to create a table with five columns - each column made one place name.

Each column was 5.2cm wide and each row (there were two rows) was 7.25 cm high.  (You might need to reduce the margins to fit that on the page - and make sure the last column hasn't been cut smaller if it doesn't fit on the page.)

I presented the names in the same way for all guests - with the script font for their first names and the other font for their surnames.  For Rob and me, the script was on the bottom - for 'Bride' and 'Groom'.

For the menu choices, I added a text box and formatted it so that the text was upside down.  This meant that once printed and folded, the menu choices were the right way up.

I altered the table lines to a pale grey, so that I could see them when I printed them out - but when cut you wouldn't be able to really tell that there were any lines there.

Once one page was ready, I copied the table onto as many pages as I needed and amended the names and menu choices - that took a while!!  I'd do it in stages, a few a day!

I cut them all out with a guillotine, then folded along the middle line.  Make sure you don't cut across the middle line - as then you're cutting the place names in half - yes, I did that once!!  Very annoying!

Once cut out and folded, it was "just" a matter of tying a length of aqua organza ribbon around the front of each place name.  I cut my ribbon to 32 cm lengths, snipped out a 'V' on each end, then tied a bow around the top front of each place name.  The bows drove me mad!!!  Trying to get them even and looking good was quite tricky!  If you don't mind wasting ribbon you could cut longer lengths, tie your bow, then snip off the ends to make the legs of the bow the same length.  I thought doing that for so many place names, I would end up wasting way too much ribbon, so I did it the hard way!

Here are ours on the big day!

Photo by LJ Photographics

The menu choices on the place names were abbreviations of the full description, so I created a menu for each table with all the options.

I made 11 of these - one for each table.  I used the same hammered card, and this time made a table in Word with three columns, each 9.05cm wide.  There was only one row, and it was the height of the page.  I used the same font as the place names to type up the menu, copied it onto each column, and printed the page out as many times as I needed.

I cut them out with the guillotine, tied (yet more!) bows and stuck them to the bottom with glue dots.

A couple of shots from the day...

Photo by LJ Photographics

Photo by LJ Photographics

What do you think?  Would you consider making your own place names and menus for your wedding?



Check out more of my wedding crafting here. 

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