The Importance Of Place Cards

As someone who loves to have people come eat at my table I am a big proponent of place cards. I don’t like that, sit-anywhere-you-want, attitude. I like to curate my table. Now, I have no problem inviting a random group to come for dinner, but once they are at my house I want to mix it up around the table. I never want there to be any feeling that there is a “cool” group at one end of the table and an outcast group at the other end.

It helps to put the loud with the quiet, the extroverted with the shy, the good listeners with the story tellers. By writing someone’s name at a place I am saying specifically, “I am glad you are here and I think you will enjoy the people around you.”

Place cards can just be simple bits of paper with a name hand written on them or something more elaborate. My very favorite place cards I ever did were when I had a string of “bass” Christmas lights and I wrote each guests name on a fish and strung it around the table.

I wish I had a photo of that because it was brilliant.

I was having more people than my dining room table could fit in my little house in Washington. So I got a piece of plywood and put it on top of my table and covered it with. Big sheet of green felt. I ran the string under the felt and cut holes in it and stuck the light up plastic fish out of the hole at each place. The rest of the decorations we small succulents in little pots and a scattering of votives. It was very fun.

A few years ago Nancy at Chapel Hill Needlepoint was clearing out stuff she hadn’t sold in a while and a roll of hunter tree canvas caught my eye. It was a steal of a price and I thought it would be good to make Christmas things out of. One plan was to make place cards.

Well, the roll sat in my office for a couple of years and today I decided it was time to make some place cards for my annual Needlepoint exchange with the stitching table advisors. Since time was running short I forgave myself doing boarders or cute holly leaves and berries. I thought it was ambitious enough for me just to stitch the names.

Then I had to come up with a way to make the canvas stand up and act like a place card. I went to the dollar store and bought some fat stubby peppermint sticks which I hot glued to a card leaving a skinny space between two sticks as a slot to hold the canvas. Ta-da! I had a place card that was a little more than a slip of paper with a name scribbled on it. And it makes a nice trinket for the guest to take home.

It looks good, but I have to say, it in no way beats the light up bass name cards. I wonder where that string of lights went?