Wooden Wedding Chargers

We were approached by a client not long ago to do some unique custom chargers for her wedding reception.  Her theme was ‘rustic elegance’, and to carry it though to the end, she wanted to have wooden chargers cut for the place settings. For regular guests, she did the ( relatively) simple shape below, with the outer border trace, and a simple accent circle and the dated etched on.  For the head table, however, she wanted something special.  Each member of the wedding party had a customized charger with their name etched onto it, and some additional ornamentation – the men have a crest with rampant lions, and the women a fairly elaborate line drawing of a bird of paradise.  The two pictures shown are of the bride and groom’s chargers, which have some additional design elements.   Extra line detailing for Brett, and the very elaborate scrollwork for Molly.

The chargers are cut from simple 1/8 birch ply, and all of the ornamentation except for the date, and the crest were vectored on to help keep run time down, but in all honesty, I think that the vectored art actually looked a lot cleaner than the early raster tests we tried.