DIY – Wedding Place Cards: Hand Stamped Tags & Antique Keys

Update: In the end, I absolutely loved how they turned out! It was definitely a time commitment but as the wedding got closer (about 3 weeks out!), I went down to my workroom one night and beasted out all 135 tags. Nothing like a bit o’ panic to motivate! Everyone commented on how personal it was and a lot of our guests kept theirs as keepsakes from the wedding or attached them to their key rings.

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So I love the idea of hand stamping spoons! But the idea is so much harder than the reality. I swear that I spent two hours digging through the spoon box at Goodwill one evening trying to find spoons that weren’t sterling silver (at it’s very hard to dent!). I came home all excited and waited for my esty ordered stamps to arrive so I could begin my wonderful personalized spoons place card idea. Eh…not so much.

Firstly, if you want to do any sort of letter stamping on metal, you need a block. Secondly, no matter how awesome the videos on youtube are, stamping spoons is hard and just not that rewarding.

So I got myself a block and used my normal hammer (I bought a rubber one but don’t think it’s worth it!) on some bronze tags I purchased on Etsy (hint, the shop is awesome – if you want to order different/custom sizes they can. I wish I had! I made do with the sizes I had initially but some names are just too long and I had to order longer tags) and the stamping kit I purchased

Here’s the results of my first few tags:

My plan is to attach the personalized name tags to antique keys that I also purchased on Esty:

My words of wisdom:
1) the I and the L letters are constantly splitting my tags! Be careful about positioning and how hard you hammer
2) Get longer tags than I did! These (1/4″ x 1″ x 22 gauge) are wonderful but tiny and I ended up upgrading to longer ones (1/4″ x 1 1/2″ x 20 gauge)
3) Do your family’s names first as you don’t mind as much if you mess them up!
4) If you want to make key rings, punch the hole first before you do any stamping
5) Learn the idiosyncrasies of the letters in your stamping set – my A is super high so I have to position it lower than other letters
6) Use a sharpie to make dots for each letter you’re about to stamp – I ran out of space doing Brendan for my dad’s tag so handily converted it to Brent for Paul’s dad!

7) Attaching the keys was hard work. Use a staple remover to help open the little split rings.

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Total cost: $169.78 for supplies for 150 place names (could have been $150 if I had ordered longer tags in the first place!)