Bantam Tools Blog Wedding Place Cards Tutorial with Becky Stern

  Here’s how I made the place cards for my wedding reception using my NextDraw pen plotter and the NextDraw Merge software. Not only do they welcome guests to their seats at dinner, but each one has a personal note inside from me, my new husband, or both of us. Follow along if you’re interested in making place cards or notes like this for your own wedding or other special occasion. For this project, you will need:NextDraw 8511 pen plotterNextDraw Merge softwarePaper of your choice (I used brown letter-sized cardstock)Pens of your choice (I used Gelly Roll #551 and #703)Utility knifeRulerCutting MatBone folder or other pointy object like an awlPaper cutter (optional)Folding board (optional) Overall, I’d consider this an intermediate-level project, and an ideal first project with NextDraw Merge. This was my first big project with any plotter and the whole reason I bought it in the first place. So I’m new to plotting, and was still able to pull off this project without any problems. But I’m not new to vector graphics software.The NextDraw plugin works within Inkscape, the open-source vector graphics software, to plot your drawings. The software comes with some sample files to test out and get familiar with plotting. Admittedly I’m more familiar with Adobe Illustrator than I am with Inskcape, but the skills are transferable. I wanted to add some organic plant shapes to the place cards. I always really loved this Cuban poster art, so I traced the floral design using the bezier line tool (also called the pen tool).I like the way it looks in the sparkly gold pen on the brown paper.So I divided the page into four place cards and added the guest name text to the front and our event into text on the back. The basic NextDraw Inkscape extension also comes with some stroke fonts which are accessible in the Hershey Text menu, and NextDraw Merge comes with a separate stroke font utility for converting regular outline fonts to single-line vector art.I made a few test place cards manually, using the free software, but knew I needed to automate things if I was going to be efficient with my time and the over 100 place cards that needed plotting. That’s where NextDraw Merge comes in. It’s an incredibly powerful tool for plotting many names, many notes, many addresses, or other repetitive text with changing data. The basic NextDraw software is free, but NextDraw Merge is a separate paid extension. notion.so/ notion.so/ We composed our notes using Notion and created columns for the greeting, message, salutation, and signature.Writing all those notes was the most time-consuming part of the project, but allowed us to reflect on these relationships with our favorite people. I didn’t wait until all the notes were finished to start plotting them, but when I had enough to fill a couple of pages, I’d export the Notion database as a CSV, which stands for Comma Separated Values. CSV is a universal spreadsheet format that the NextDraw software can read. You could easily do this in Excel or Google Sheets instead, but I happened to be using Notion for other guestlist-related things already. You can copy my sample Notion database to make your own. I’ve also made a sample Google spreadsheet in case you’d rather not use Notion.   Here’s a tip I learned to align the magnetic easel: Position the pen in the home position and line up the easel such that the pen tip is at the paper corner. Then slide the pen all the way to the right, and pivot the easel to align the other paper corner.   While this tip works great, I made a spacer to help me align the easel more quickly. I used the free browser-based 3D modeling software Tinkercad to design a small tray that is just the right width to shim the easel from the machine's frame (using this particular pen), then 3D printed it. And to not waste space, it also doubles as a pen holder. You can adjust the width of the Tinkercad model to accommodate any changes in pen diameter. Back to the place card file in Inkscape– I can use the name of the column in my spreadsheet, inside double curly braces to refer to the data. In this case, I used the Name column. Then to plot four at once, I need to specify a different row in the spreadsheet, and that’s done with two plus symbols and the number of rows to skip ahead. So if I start my plotting with row 1 of my data spreadsheet, this text that says just Name will be replaced with the name in row one, then {{Name++1}} will be replaced with the name in row two, {{Name++2}} will be replaced with the name in row four, and {{Name ++3}} will be replaced with the name from row four.   Next I went over to the NextDraw Merge extension and told it what data file I wanted to use. That’s the CSV I downloaded earlier. I also picked which font I wanted to use, since this plugin will replace the variable text with the single line font of your choice. Here’s also where you can choose to enable handwriting defects, which make the result look more like it was drawn by a human.