Fork Name Cards

When it came to figuring out name cards and seating assignments I had seen a million different options that I liked. What the decision came down to was the space and where to put the seating chard. We found a large garden trellis at Homegoods one day and liked the pattern so we purchased it. After a bit of thinking we decided it would be great to use to hang all of our seating assignments. We don't have much space at the barn and this could prop up against the wall while the guests are outside at the cocktail hour.  Below is a picture of the garden trellis, we put very small picture frames for each letter of the alphabet:

For the name cards, we still didn't know what to do except now we knew they needed to be able to hang. I saw a neat idea where a fork was bent to look like an easel somewhere on the internet, I can't remember where:

 This inspired me to do something with a fork since the individual prongs seemed to be bent easily and I liked the idea of a fork as a place setting for dinner. After breaking a good number of forks and making some weird shapes we curled back the prongs with a pair of small pliers. We still couldn't figure out how to get the fork on the trellis. We debated string, paper clips, magnets, etc and finally ended up bending the fork in half.

The fork can now hang over the metal in the garden trellis under the appropriate letter.

In order to put the names on, I bought a paper punch at Michael's in a square shape to put in between the prongs of the fork. Of course the table numbers are missing, but I haven't figured those out yet!

                      

This hardly took any time, but it did take a little muscle to bend certain forks. My mom and I bought all of these forks at the thrift store and they came in bags of 4 or 5. Out of every bag we could usually bend about 3 or 4. Some were just too thick to bend the prongs or the entire fork in half. You'll easily be able to tell when you start to bend the fork if it will work or not, don't force it - the easy ones will bend with hardly any pressure!