We’ve got the summertime blues! Well we’ve got a gorgeous summer blue table theme, which is actually much better!

We recently celebrated Calum’s Birthday with a french themed dinner party for a dozen of our friends. I know it seems like we were celebrating his birthday for the whole of August, but we don’t see a problem with that, do you? Calum did a great job of being the chef for the evening, and Rich got on with laying the table and creating the vibe! We’ve got a good division of labour going on.

For our french inspired dinner, we decided to go with a Summer Blue Table Theme. We have a lot of blue and white bits and pieces about the place so it works well.

With 12 people for dinner, we had to borrow a couple of trestle tables to fit everyone in.  These ugly tables are hidden under crisp white linens. To add interest we laid a beautiful blue ikat table runner down the centre, we picked this up from Sainsbury’s during our weekly shop, you wouldn’t believe it, would you?  The table was set with mismatch crockery, mixing up blue willow pattern plates and a basic white plate. The napkins were a mixture of a white linen set and some repurposed tea towels from Ikea.  The glassware is all a bit of a mix, we only have sets for up to eight people so we had to improvise with whatever odd glasses we can find about the house. Add in a couple of blue water bottles and we are halfway there.

For the flowers Rich ask his mum, a retired florist, to make up half a dozen small posies to run down the centre of the table, we mixed this in with some of our collection of blue and white ceramics.  We found some vintage candle stick holders to give the scene a bit of elegance. A word of warning about using candles outdoors, dinner candles like this can only be used on the stillest of days, as soon a the wind gets up you will end up with the candles being blow out, and getting wax everywhere!

Lastly, Rich likes to print out a nice menu and do place settings. He is a Graphic designer by vocations so enjoys doing things like this. We strung up some fairy lights and had a soundtrack of Edith Piaf and some gypsy swing.  This all adds to the atmosphere for a lovely evening with friends, we had a great time.

So there we have our Summer blue table theme, It was mainly improvised using things we had around the house, but we think it worked out really well.  What do you think?