Science-y, steampunk-y vial place cards

We’re trying our best to make the dining table look like the desk of a (mad?) scientist. For some reason — I have no idea why — I really fell in love with the idea of using tiny vials somewhere in the wedding. So these are our place cards! They’re all itty bitty glass vials with a label and some contents. We made 11 different types. I designed the labels: we used our ordinary printer and ordinary paper, and we glued them on with an ordinary glues stick. The label names are geeky references. The contents are mostly things from the pantry. And then we’re gonna put the name cards on top.

Here are the geeky references with their vial contents:

• Wonderflonium (Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog): sugar and glitter
• Midi-chlorian (Star Wars): Teriyaki sauce
• Unobtainium (features in a lot of sci-fi and even engineering. Last time I saw it was in Avatar): baking powder

• Mithril (Lord of the Rings): sparkly sugar
• Oxytocin (is a real chemical that has gotten the nickname “the love hormone”): turmeric
• Star Dust (could be anything. But we do love the Stardust movie): really pretty glitter
• Tylium (Battlestar Galactica — notice the cut corners!): smoked salt

• Polyjuice Potion (Harry Potter): water with food colour
• Athelas (Lord of the Rings): dried peppermint leaves
• Adamantium (X-men): silver sugar pearls
• In Norwegian: “Getafix Mighty Magical Strength Potion Effective against Romans, Vikings, Pirates and bullies in general” (Asterix and Obelix): olive oil

I am super psyched about how well they turned out. We’ll try to distribute them so that people next to each other have different ones. Hopefully they’ll work as a bit of an ice breaker too.