It's that little paper doohickey that you set out for people so that they know where they're sitting.
Awesome! So this will tell me exactly how to do that, right?
Well, this will tell you one way to do that. My wedding is going to have a buffet, so I didn't worry about including anything more than their name and table number, and I went with making the foldable ones that look like little tents. So, if you follow this recipe without ANY modifications, you'll end up with a tented escort card, that has the person's name and table number on it.
Ready?
Excellent, let's begin with the technological part - that thing you do on the computer.
You will need:
For the computer portion:
1) Cardstock Paper
2) A printer that will print on Cardstock Paper (the first one I tried wouldn't - it was a little too thick)
3) MS Word, and a basic working knowledge of it (I'm using the 2010 Student/Home version - if you're using a different version, you'll have to figure the tables out for yourself)
For later:
4) Pencil with eraser (I happened to have a fancy-shmancy mechanical [which has the added benefit of a nice 'gentle' eraser; VERY important that the eraser be clean, and easy on the paper], but as long as it's got both a point and an eraser, you're good)
5) Micron Pen (I'm using .25mm line width - for what I was drawing, this seemed to work best)
6) Permanent Markers (Again, what you need will really depend on what you are drawing. For my black I used a fine point Bic Mark It, and for the colors I used both Sharpie and Bic Mark Its, depending on what was available)
7) A good pair of Scissors
8) *OPTIONAL, but RECOMMENDED* A good sense of humor. If you're undertaking this particular task, there's probably something a little kooky about you anyway, but hey! You're about to sit down and draw who-knows-how-many little dinky place cards for people, and they probably wont even look twice at them. Remember this on hour three of repetitive lines, come up with some ludicrous remark, and keep on truckin'! :D
Alright, let's begin. First, open up a blank document in MSWord. Because of the layout that I've chosen for my escort cards, which is wider and shorter (for pretty obvious stability reasoning), I'm going to go up to Layout and change the Orientation to Landscape.
Then I went and removed the margins (I'm not posting a picture of that, you can't read it anyway when its compressed to fit here), but you go to Page Layout > Margins > Custom Margins, then change Top/Bottom/Left/Right to zero inches, then hit "Okay".
You now have the basic page to start with. HOORAY!!! Pat yourself on the back. ;)
Next, decide approximately what size you want your escort cards to be. If it helps, take a piece of regular printer paper, put it on the table in the 'Landscape' position as seen above, and fold it to about the size you want - this should give you an idea how many columns you're going to have when you go to make the table (more on that later). Me personally, I went with the "What's it look like if I just fold it in thirds?" approach, (which gave me a width of approximately 3.67" per card-looked good to me!), and thus when we make the table later, it'll be 3 columns wide.
Then, you've gotta decide how tall you want them to be; remember, this is a tented card, so you're going to need double the space that you would for a flat card (ie: if you want a 2" tall card, you'll need 4", 2" for the front, 2" for the back). Again, I went with the "Huh, what's easily divisable into this size paper, remembering that I need both a front and back for my card?" and (with all of my mathematical genius) came up with 4. Okay, four divides into 8.5 and it comes out to... um... well... This gave me something just over 2" tall- looked fine to me, and it made it pretty easy.
I promise this will get less confusing later.
With me so far? Pick your approximate width and height, and - my personal recommendation here - be nice to yourself, so that you're not futzing with an extra .0976" that you can't figure out where it came from/where it went.
Okay?
ONWARD!
Go back to your document, Insert > Table > Insert Table.
HAH! Here's where those numbers come in. See that spot that says, "Number of Columns"? That means "How many wide do you want it?" I go back, see that I folded my paper in thirds, and enter the number "3" here.
Then, I go to the place that says, "Number of Rows", and I enter the number "4". But WAIT!!! THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT I WILL FIT A NAME IN EACH OF THOSE ROWS! It's okay, take a deep breath. This means that - vertically - there will be TWO place cards per sheet. There are four rows because you need a front and back for each card. Bear with me here, I know it's hard. ;)
Then, BEFORE I HIT "okay", I click "AutoFit to Window". THEN I hit "okay".
This should bring up a table that leaves you going, "WTF IS THAT?" It's okay - it should look something like this:
Now, click on one of the boxes in the table, and put your mouse over it. This should bring up the image of a little square down by the lowest, right hand corner of the table.
Click that little gray square, and drag it all the way to the bottom of the document. This should stretch your table to the size of the paper, like such:
Okay, the hardest part is over. Now, LEAVE YOUR TOP ROW BLANK! Go down to the second row. Pick your font (I used "Baroque Script"), your positioning (I centered it&set it a few lines down from the top of the box), and start typing!
I shrunk it down so no creepers can read the names on mine via the internet (I don't know why they would, but hey, they're creepers), but basically, this is what the page should look like once you've got the information entered:
Once you have the first page done, you can either start all over on a new page, or do what I did - select the entire thing, hit "ctrl+c", then paste it and just replace the names.
For whatever reason, I had compatibility issues with the font that I selected (user error I'm sure), so what I had to do to print them was first save them as .doc, then save it as a .pdf - I did this by going to File > Save&Send > Create PDF/XPS Document. Then I printed up the .pdf and used that as my blank.
Print that up, and come back here when you're ready for drawin'!
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