My Little Devil: Place Cards

They say the devil is in the details, and entering the home stretch of wedding planning, I have quite a few little demons that won't get off my back. This past week I have finally tackled the guest book and am actually quite happy with the way that project is shaping up. But now I have to face a problem I have been avoiding since we began planning this whole thing: seating at dinner. Browsing through the Brides photo gallery, I had to laugh when I stumbled upon this picture:

{photo from Brides}

Oh if only life it was that easy for Faye and I. We may all be "friends and family here" but my grandparents are divorced...and haven't been in the same room since 1986 (didn't turn out well then)...and we have only a few dinner tables. So assigned seating it is, and I can't tell if there is a difference between place cards, escort cards, and seating cards- but I know we need at least one of them! We definitely need a card at their actual assigned seat at the table (I'm assuming that this is what a seating card is). This is necessary because the grandparents have been strategically placed at opposite ends of the reception hall, such that neither of them is visible in the others' peripheral field of vision. I also have other guests positioned to run interference, in case someone strays from the playbook and goes to the bathroom the long way or tries to sneak out the back door instead of the front for a smoke.

So we will not be using any sort of system like these below; hopefully, with only a few tables, people can mill around and find their seats easily without it looking like musical chairs at a middle school dance. But if we were going to use place/escort cards, we would steal one of these ideas:

{Clockwise, L to R: horseshoe escort cards; escort cards in seaglass; clothesline place cards; pinwheel place cards}