My Mom was visiting us this weekend, and as Mothers Day is coming up soon (and she will be back in SA by then) yesterday, I decided to set a pretty table for an early Mothers Day lunch for her along botanical themed lines.
My inspiration came from two sources - earlier in the week I preordered Selina Lake's new book Botanical Style and not even a day or so later Depot's newsletter annouced their new collection Botanic Living. It was a sign! So I picked up a few things and combined some of the goodies I already had at home to complete the look. I decided to break it down for you so that you can see what are some things you should look out for when creating a theme without having to buy brand new goodies all the time.
WHAT DID I BUY NEW?
Green Glass Hurricane Vases x 1 Large, Medium, Small
Two fake little dragonflies mini props
A set of dragonfly and bee stickers
Fern Paper Napkins
Green striped ribbon
Fern Postcards x 2
WHAT DID I HAVE ON HAND?
I was lucky that my dining room table is marble and my chairs white - so no linen required. I think a wooden table will work just as well.
My plain white plates and bowls worked great, especially when placed alongside my gold cutlery I bought two years ago. (I would still recommend getting a set).
All my glassware: wine glasses, tumblers and jug are the normal day to day plain glass ones I use.
Copper Tray (I have used this tray so many times for entertaining and it has a permanent spot in my lounge - maybe "copper" is not as cool as it used to be but go for a metallic one if you already have a wooden one.
Marble and Wooden Cutting Board - love these! You just can't have enough of these. My friend has actually 8 of the same and she uses these for plates at her dinner party! #tablegoal
Copper Votives (another of my Christmas buys)
Mini green glass vases (picked these up years ago at IKEA on sale)
Purple tulips - a gift from a friend earlier in the week
Christmas Roses - from my garden (the benefit of such a "green" theme is that most likely you will be able to use lots of flowers and leaves straight from your garden).
INVITATION
I spotted the postcards in Depot, and I took one of each design... I was then able to scan these and make a simple digital invitation to send to the family inviting them for an early Mothers Day lunch. The cards then doubled as part of a garland decoration on the day, and the girls wrote a message on each one for Mothers Day cards that we will send in the post so that they hopefully arrive before the 8th of May.
DECORATION
I didn't decorate the room itself, so the main focus was the table... luckily my wallpaper though not true Botanical style, still looked okay and I strung up a few details to tie into the table. Making your own garland like this is always an easy and so effective as all you need is some ribbon/twine, washi tape and mini pegs. Then just peg on some cards, flowers, anything that you may have already used on the table.
TABLE
And here is the table...
The main focus of such a theme must be the flowers. So I used multiple vases, votives and holders to hold all different types of flowers: tulips and Christmas roses and leaves: succulents and ferns. In the past I would often buy many of the same type of vase. Now, I try to focus on matching colour sets but in a variety of sizes. I realise I like to vary the shape and use one/two differnt colours. Visually the varied sizes looks so much more appealing than all the same type of arrangement in the same type of vase. Loving that green glass!
PLACE SETTINGS
For place cards, I used the handles of wooden cutlery and stuck on the dragonfly or bee stickers. I used extras to make little "name" tagged spoons for the spices.
MENU
I had not really thought the menu through, so if I do this theme again I will definitely focus on lots of organic and herbal dishes to tie into the botanical theme properly. We had mini vegetable cakes, vegetable puffs and meat balls. For drinks, it was just cucumber water for the kids and Hugos (champagne with sparkling water and eldeflower syryp) for the grownups.
FAVOURS
I spotted this idea in the old May issue of Martha Stewart that I had on my coffee table last week. The cover showed how you just take pretty paper and wrap up grocery store bought flowers with blooms from your backyard and create little nosegay posies for your guests. This was easily done as I already had all teh flowers and Depot had the eprfect matching gift wrap that I had bought to wrap my Mothers Day gift. Plus, another great idea for the paper is to use it as a table runner!
So there was my "early" Mothers Day impromptu lunch idea... As Mothers Day is still a few weeks away I am sure I will plan and share some more ideas. I know it's crazy but my favourite thing to do on Mothers Day is to have the time and space set up a pretty table!
0 comments:
Post a Comment