Place cards with pizazz

By Beatriz Terrazas

Dazzle your party guests with place cards that reflect a theme and spark conversation. Rob Goff, owner of the interior design company Maxwell & Fisher, LLC, based in Medina, Washington, creates unique place cards for all his events.

“I like the focus to be in the creativity and the ingenuity of the card holder, not the card or the font of the card itself,” he says.

Points to keep in mind

“You need to be clever and not too silly, and the place cards need to tie in somehow to the guests or the food,” Goff offers.

• Make the old new again. One of Goff’s favorites begins with a common thrift store find: unmatched china. Layer a saucer with gourmet soaps, wrap in colored cellophane, and attach the name card with raffia. It also doubles as a lovely host gift!
• Gifts that grow. Tiny potted plants make “a perfect card holder that guests can take home and put on their windowsill, and later in the ground outside,” Goff says.
• Pull in the outdoors. Magnolia leaves turn a lovely fall brown that’s the perfect backdrop for writing guests’ names with gold or silver marker. Got pinecones? Spray paint them gold or silver and prop cards between the petals.
• Think themes. Goff once hosted a French-themed dinner and used — what else? — berets to guide guests to their seats. Wine splits wrapped in colored cellophane got people talking at another party.
• Who’s invited? One Thanksgiving, Goff had a young guest who was enthusiastically studying pilgrims and Native Americans. Goff researched major characters from that era and assigned guests historical aliases (with their own names in parentheses).

The key, according to Goff, is to give your guests a memorable, useful keepsake of the event.