Label Place Card Holder

thingiverse

We're hosting a party soon, and my wife wanted to label all the food we'll be serving. So, I decided to design a quick label place card holder. I'm not sure what they're officially called, but I've seen them sold at party stores for around $2-3 each, so I was curious: could I print mine for cheaper? It turns out it only costs me $0.10 worth of plastic and an hour or less of my time to make one. I'm working on a goal to design things that don't need support material, and this label holder fits the bill. It can be printed upright as long as your printer can handle the 33mm bridge at the top (which you should be able to with decent cooling). I've included a design file called "Place Card Holder.ai" that you can use to design your own inserts for printing. The file is an Adobe Illustrator template designed for standard "letter" paper size, so as long as you follow the margins shown and print the final graphic as a full page with no margins, your inserts should be correctly sized. I highly recommend making a test print of the blank template first to ensure that your sizes are correct before taking the time to design your labels. The insert is 26x70mm in size, with a 1mm margin hidden from view in case you want to design your own template instead. The slot is designed to be 0.8mm wide, so it should be able to accommodate even heavy weight card stock. I left the design as-is for now, with lots of flat area in the corners. My intention was to eventually modify this design to include some kind of hole or holes in those corners where either a festive graphic could be seen on the printed label or a pin/hole style 3D printed part could be snapped in to add a seasonal flair. If I ever make any changes, I'll be sure to post them and would love to see any remixes people create! The photos show my final printed version off my Ender 3 as well as a version that was sanded and painted with a metallic finish. If you choose to sand yours, cut enough layers of labels to fill the slot completely and it'll hold the thin "bridge" at the top in place so it sands evenly with the rest of the front face. I didn't bother sanding anything other than the front on mine. Happy printing!