I love personalized….everything! Maybe to a fault. This year I wanted to create a nice place card for our holiday table and when I saw these unfinished wood nutcrackers I knew what I had to do.
I painted each nutcracker with a different color – one for each of my 8 family members – unfortunately at the end, I switched my mom and my oldest daughter’s colors but I think they’ll still be happy.
In this post I share the supplies I used, alternatives for you, and some different ways I think these could be really cute.
Nutcracker Place Card Supplies
- Unfinished wooden nutcrackers. I found them here
- Acrylic Paint
- Sandpaper
- Paintbrushes that are good on wood
- Gold Matte Vinyl
- Cricut *
Nutcracker Place Card Directions
- Start by sanding down each nutcracker. I did not do this and….regret.
- Paint each nutcracker however you desire, for me, every one of them required two coats of paint, and some of the lighter colors like pink and lavender required three. You could probably make these even bolder and with better coverage by painting them with a primer or plain white paint first. It takes some time to get into all of the little spaces so turn on YouTube or your favorite audiobook and sink into it for a while.
- Measure the place at the bottom of the nutcracker so that you can cut a name to fit. For me, that was 1″ wide by 0.25″ tall. I used Cricut’s BFC Winter Wishes font because when you’re cutting this small you don’t want a lot of small loopy things to cut out. Cut out your guest’s names in gold matte permanent vinyl, weed it, and place it on the bottom of the nutcracker.
Nutcracker Place Card Alternatives
Lettering – I know that not everyone has a Cricut machine, but the same effect could be accomplished with small stickers like the ones I found here. You could also use a thin gold paint marker to write names. Finally, you could also print the names on regular paper or on vellum, trim them, and glue them in place. I haven’t tried any of these alternatives, but they’re all of the options I would try if I didn’t have access to my Cricut. Any other ideas? Leave them for me in the comments.
Styles – My holiday style is bright colors (that’s really my style all the way around) but wouldn’t these look stately all black with gold names? Or in traditional red and green colors?
I just thought of one more look/lettering option – paint with chalkboard paint and use a chalk marker to write the name – then you could reuse them year after year as your guests change. The ideas are flowing!
