Thursday, June 25, 2015

Placecard Puzzler

Unique escort card display with wooden logs. love the detail of the monogram on the ends
Working with my current wedding charges we found the above photo on Pinterest.  It is of a lovely set of little log placecard holders made from birchwood...or painted tree branches, cut just perfectly to hold the couple's guest's seating assignments.  

My happy couple LoVEd the idea and put it on their list of things for me to make them.  Sadly, as I worked down my list and came to the woodsy card holders I realized they would not work very easily for the placecards they needed to hold.

My couple's placecard holders are these sweet little luggage tags....After a while I realized the pinterest picture is for cards...single sheets of paper, maybe folded in half that can fit in a single saw cut.  These luggage tags require a slot 3/8" thick.

Help from Hubbs is not an option right now, not that he can help much with this issue with the tools we currently have.  I thought about routing the slot out with my new router, but I am not super confident with it yet, especially not confident enough to try to route out the slot on a round branch.

The only choice was to come up with other options and see if the happy couple could fall in love with one of them.  Here we go!

Above was my first try.  I cut a log in half, cut it into one inch sections, and glued them to a piece of wood just about the width of the log.  The idea would be maybe it would look enough like a whole log....Nope.  Next try...

This one, the more I look at it, the more it grows on me.  I actually like it without that piece of birch off the front.  I rustically painted a section of 1x4, then glued the same birch pieces to the board.  I used a 1/2" molding to make the spaces between tree branch pieces.  I like the nature mixed with the rustic man-made look.  Hmmmm...

The wedding venue looks like this...
It is an amazing mix of elegance and grunge.  Scott recommended moving away from the "nature" looking, and embracing the grunge, industrial look a bit more.  That lead to this option...
Same rustic plank, but drilled a billion times and railroad nails pounded in to act like a divider.

I love it.  The only problem is the couple's colors are light pink and gold.  These nails are silver.

One more idea...

I shopped for about an hour looking for the moldings...I hate it.  It might be that it is painted gold...
I hate it.   Nope.  Not even a contestant.

After showing these to the bride tonight when she dropped by, It looks like we have a winner.

We are going to paint the planks light pink, rough them up, and spray those nails a matching gold color.  Only two more days to get it done.  Here I go.  Heaven help me!
I think I can, I think I can, I think I can...

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