Hands up, everyone who’s been to an event where, once the speeches and celebrations are complete, you’re invited to turn over your chair to look for a colourful dot or other symbol signifying you’ve won the table centrepiece or some other door prize.

Keep those hands up if you’ve been the person who got to maneuver all those chairs in the first place, stickers in hand.

Well, Anne, our artisan-in-residence, not only designed cheery centrepieces for another recent event, but also offered a simple and clever way of identifying the door prize winners … one that precludes dozens of people upending their chairs as an event draws to a close, when people are invited to check and see who has won a prize.

Anne, pictured above, ordered one primary bouquet for the entrance to the event room – and then a good supply of similar flowers that she and Manjit, below, arranged themselves for lovely little centrepieces.

Now, how to identify the lucky recipients of the prizes you’ll give away, without making it transparent which are the lucky places at the table?

It’s all in the place settings – or, to be more precise, in the napkins. Do you see the small gold heart just inside a fold of the napkin above?

You’ll see above that Anne and Manjit created accordion folds in each napkin, and then used an office hole puncher to create a single hole near the base of each napkin. The next step was to string a bit of black ribbon through the hole, before fanning out the upper portion of the napkin.

If your event calls for linens rather than paper supplies, you could still follow the premise – sans hole punching and ribbons, natch.

Anne purchased a small supply of stickers; you can adapt your choice to whatever theme you may have for your event. After making accordion folds in each napkin, and setting the napkins out at all places, she made her way around the tables and affixed a sticker inside the fold of one napkin per table.

After your guests have arrived and settled in at their tables, your MC can invite people to check their napkins for stickers … and you, as the event organiser, can sit back and enjoy guests’ reactions, without the scraping and bumping of multiple chairs!

Want to learn more about Anne?

If you’d like to see some of Anne’s lovely jewellery, paintings or more, you may wish to click here to have a look at her Pinterest site.