Sailboat Place Cards From Disposable Bamboo Bowls

I’ve always liked the disposable bamboo bowls that you find at food markets. They are elegantly designed and environmentally friendly. They are also so obviously boat-shaped that it stands to reason that they would be crafted into something nautical. These place cards were my experiment in mini boat-building.

For this project I used the smaller boats, thin skewer sticks, washi tape, glue gun and a thin, white plastic project file cover. The plastic is not quite smooth because I thought that a slightly textured surface would be easier to write on.

Not pictured here is the gold nail varnish and tac I ended up using for the base. A safer bet would probably be clay of some sort. It needs to have a weight to it though.

To make the mast I cut a skewer a bit longer than the bowl. My bowl is 11cm and the mast is 15cm (apologies to all you lovers of Imperial). I quickly discovered that you can’t make the mast too tall otherwise it makes the boat unstable. That said, you need to make an allowance for the sails to sit comfortably in the hull. I have new respect for boat builders.

I cut about 7cm of washi tape and positioned the sharp end of the skewer in the middle of it. Then I wrapped the 2 sides of the tape so that they stuck to each other, trimmed off any skew parts and cut a V into the edge.

This created a cute burgee flag (I had to Google it - I know nothing about boats).

I cut a 8,5cm(w) x 10cm(h) triangle from the plastic file and then glued the skewer to the middle of the triangle with the washi tape sail sticking out above.

With my initial effort I just stuck the mast to the bamboo with the glue gun but then thought the better of it. It would be much easier to have a removable mast because it would make writing and erasing much easier and meant that the place cards could be reused. The only problem was that I didn’t have access to polymer or air dry clay. I did, however, have Prestik (tac) and considering how hard it becomes when cold, I thought I would give it a try.

I rolled a ball and stuck the mast into it to make an indentation and positioned the lot on the bamboo hull, the right size only achieved after the boat capsized a couple of times. The skewer must fit snugly into the tack but must be able to slide out. I took out the skewer and let the tack harden. As mentioned, this may not be best practice but seemed to work.

Once it was nice and cold I painted everything including the hollow with nail polish. This should also harden the the tac but obviously pressing it too hard will cause issues.

Finally I glued the tac base into position, wrote names on the sails and planted the mast.