Posted by Futch
We celebrated the engagement of dear friends recently with a small dinner party at home. I wanted the table to look really special. I am loving pink with succulents right now, and teamed up with black and gold it's a scheme that is chic but not to serious. I love how it turned out. Scroll down to see how you can create this setting easily and inexpensively at your house.
I recently bought a set of charcoal dinner plates, I just love how the dark colour shows off the food. These ones were $37 for a set of 12 pieces at Freedom a few weeks ago. I already had the plain black table cloth and gold chargers. I use these chargers all the time, a really good investment many years ago.I treated myself to new black linen napkins, only $2.50 each at a $2 store which is also where I found the tablecloth. My only other purchase was a bunch of pink alstroemeria, any soft pink flower would work just as well.
To set up I picked some succulent stems from the garden and arranged them with a few of the pink flowers in used black glass candle holders. Then it's as easy as laying out the gold chargers with a black plate on each one. Fold each napkin into a neat rectangle and place one on each plate. Arrange cutlery on top of the napkin. To easy.
Soft and pretty but still elegant. Love how it turned out. Good food, good company and a little bit of prettiness makes the world a wonderful place.
Posted by Futch
The lovely thing about doing flowers for a dinner party is you get to have them around the house afterwards. These ones migrated to my bedroom.I am just loving succulents and pink flowers together right now, the black glass makes it just a little more grown up.
Hope you all had a fabulous long weekend.
Posted by Futch
A neat little trick a picked up off Pinterest a few years ago. I often want to use low wide vases for flowers, this one is actually a glass salad bowl. So how do you prevent the flowers all flopping towards the edges and create height in the centre. Easy, magic tape to the rescue.Scroll down to see howUse strips of magic tape to create a rough web across the vase.
The flowers will hang over the edges and hide the end of the tape.
Now simply arrange the flowers as if they were in a normal vase, using the tape as a support to make flowers in the centre stand up.
Enjoy your gorgeous arrangement.
Posted by Futch
This year I am moving things around, trying to do more with what I already have. I created this tablescape for my outdoor coffee table and thought I would share how it developed.
I have had the marble tray for years and have never managed to style it up quite how it looked in the store. This vignette is working much better than the tray on its own, and it was quick and inexpensive to achieve. I already had the small glass vase and marble flower plate, I only added a larger size glass vase (a steal at $16) and bought the succulent at a street market. You can see below how it started out and how I built it up.
Two vases, one taller and wider (both from my favourite variety store), and the gorgeous succulent to add colour and texture. The flower plate has been in my bathroom with a candle on it, but is far prettier here.
It's still evolving, I think the candle is to pale, perhaps another succulent? But overall I am really enjoying the effect. Especially like that the succulent will be happy in the winter sunlight and won't need to be replaced for months.
So pleased that I moved all these things around and tried something new. Turns out that a change was all that tray needed to go from flat to fantastic.
Posted by Futch
There is nothing I love more than fresh flowers, they just add life to any room, but they can be expensive. Real luxury is being able to pick your own flowers, on our farm I filled the whole house with roses from spring through summer. Every few days I went into the garden with a basket and came back with bunches to fill every vase in the house. Hopefully I will be able to do that again one day, but for now I will share a little trick to getting fresh flowers that last and last and take just minutes to arrange. That's my quick and easy solution in the photo below. Sound good? Do your own quick long lasting flowers:Flat bottomed basket + drip tray + 5 flower pots
Start with a flat bottomed basket or bowl that is about 15cm deep. This basket comes from Pond but keep an eye out at second hand stores for large silver bowls. I saw this lovely basket at Freedom the other day which would work well too.
Then pop out to your local garden centre and buy however many kalanchoe pots you need to fill your basket. You don't want to see the pots. The basket needs to be deep enough that the sides cover the pots from the side, and you need enough plants packed in so that the leaves cover the pots from the top. It should look like the basket is full of flowers. Take yours to the garden centre so you can test out just how many you need to get this effect.You will also need a plastic drip tray to stand in the basket and protect the base when you water the flowers. 
Kalanchoe are perfect for this outdoor basket or a sunny indoor spot. They are succulents with long lasting flowers that gradually change colour as they get older. Mine have been looking gorgeous for a few weeks now and have turned a pretty soft pink which I love against our black exterior walls. If you have your basket in a shaded spot they will need to be placed in the sun for a few days every few weeks to keep healthy and keep flowering.
Orchids are lovely too, use one larger pot in a deep vase. They can be expensive to buy but flower for ages and you can enjoy them again next year. My orchids love the shady spot at our front steps and have sent up a gorgeous spray of flowers which are just about to open. I may just leave them there and not bring them inside this year.
There you have it! Quick, easy to get a lovely look, and your flowers will last for weeks.
Soft and pretty but still elegant. Love how it turned out. Good food, good company and a little bit of prettiness makes the world a wonderful place.
