If you are serving Thanksgiving dinner at your house, you might want to make place cards so people know where to sit or just for a table decoration. When I was a little girl, I always liked to make place cards! Sometimes I made them at my grandma’s house when it was just my family and grandparents. I just folded some paper in half and stuck on a sticker or drew a little picture. Little did I know that years later I would have all kinds of paper, ink, and stamps and a multitude of tools and accessories to make place cards!
Here are three ideas for making place cards.
This little pumpkin is made with punched hearts. I used the heart in the retired Heart Punch Pack that had this regular heart punch and one with a scalloped heart punch. You may have other heart punches or heart dies you can use. If you have the retired Apple Builder Punch that would work also. Just cut or punch out several hearts and score them down the middle to make folding them in half easier. You can cut out a little stem by hand if you like.
Fold and crease each heart in half. Apply glue to the top of the first folded heart and adhere another folded heart to it, making sure it lines up pretty well on all sides until you have all the hearts stacked up and glued together. Use as many or few hearts as you like. Before making it into a pumpkin, use a sturdy scissors and cut off the bottom point of the stack of heart to make a straight line for the base of the pumpkin. You only need to take off a little bit. Die cut or cut out by hand a leaf and write a name of a guest for the place card. Then open up the stacked hearts. before you glue them together, adhere the stem if you cut one and the leaf to hold them. Glue the hearts together so you have a standing pumpkin! If you want to get fancy, maybe you have a stamp set with a pumpkin and can stamp that first and fussy cut or diecut, whatever you have, or shade the edges of the hearts.
Here’s the standard kind of place card, the kind I used to make for our family dinners. You can make it any size you want. Mine is a 4 1/2″ x 4″ piece of Basic White cardstock, scored in half at 2 1/4″. I stamped the small pumpkins from the Playful Ghosts Stamp Set, colored them with Stampin’ Blends markers, then cut out by hand. I also diecut some foliage from the Textured Floral Dies in both Lemon Lime Twist and Garden Green cardstock. If you have the Bough Punch you can use that. I cut the diecut foliage apart because I only needed little pieces to glue to the place card behind the pumpkin. I put just a tiny bit of glue behind the pumpkin to hold it in place while I glued down the foliage where I wanted it and then added a bit more glue under the sides of the pumpkins. An easier way, if you have the stamps that fit, would be to stamp a pumpkin, hold a mask over it, then stamp foliage on each side. Remove the mask that protected the pumpkin and yours should look like mine except stamped! Or simply stamp and color a pumpkin in the corner of the card.
This kind of place card is actually a little party favor, too! I simply covered a small chocolate bar with a piece of designer paper and added a name on top. I used a piece of the green plaid paper in the Season of Green & Gold Specialty Designer Series Paper. You could just use cardstock as well. I used a piece that was about 2 1/2″ x 3 1/2″. It all depends on your candy bar, of course. For this card, I diecut a piece from the Everyday Details Dies on which to glue on the pumpkins and write the name. On the other candy bar in the top photo, I used a diecut from the Unbounded Love Dies in Very Vanilla and used a Pumpkin Pie Stampin’ Blend just to outline the edges of the diecut, plus added two Gold Textured Dots. There are no bounds to what you can do with these!
These are just some ideas to get you started! Once you begin, you will likely come up with more and better ideas! Just have fun!
