Thankful Things Place Cards

I'm hosting Thanksgiving next week for my husband's family and a few close friends. Because there are so many of us (we're expecting 30+ guests this year) we're usually more of a buffet-style-paper-plate-and-plastic-cup-grab-a-seat-anywhere crowd. We're still serving buffet style, but I thought it would be nice to have place settings at the 11 available seats (8 at my new dining room table and 3 at the kitchen counter). Instead of place cards with guests' names at each seat I made Thankful Things place cards.

Ignore that crumb in the corner. :-) The idea is for each setting to have a different thing we're thankful for. One tag says "Family" another will say "Friends" and another "Health." You get the idea. Okay, I'm not very crafty so I was pretty proud of these. And they were really inexpensive. I used my own wrought iron napkin rings and jazzed them up with the same gold pen I wrote with on the tags and some really inexpensive fall bead thingies from Michael's. (Don't you like my crafting vocabulary?) The "thingies" were 30 cents a piece on sale. I extracted six or seven strands out of each thingy and wrapped them around my napkin rings. Then I used brown thread to tie the gift tags. The gift tags were the most expensive item at $4 a package and the pen cost me about $2. All in all though, not bad. Hopefully the food will look this good!