Orchard Blog - table theme Archives

Our Autumn Harvest Table Setting

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Time for Harvest Festival

Now we are into October and the weather has turned we start thinking about cosier parties inside the cottage. The past weekend we had an autumn harvest dinner for a group of friends to celebrate the season. Harvest Festival is the traditional British celebration around this time of year, it is the less well know cousin of the American Thanksgiving. We both have memories of our churches harvest festival celebrations from when we were little, and many churches continue to celebrate. We though this is a perfect excuse for a party (we don’t need much encouragement).

Pumpkins Galore

To us, autumn decorations for can only mean one thing, pumpkins! We used this Mottled Rose Gold Pumpkin Battery Light from Lights4fun to create a table centre. Fresh pumpkins are now in the supermarket so it was easy to pick up a couple of small ones, along with a mini variety known as munchkin pumpkins. In addition to this, we mixed in some ornamental squash and gourds we picked up on a recent trip to Garsons farm shop in Esher. We found a mix of different colours and shapes to compliment the pumpkins.

Our Harvest Table

When we were laying our harvest table we added in some eucalyptus foliage from the garden to create a base, and placed this on a plan linen table runner with some decorative autumn maple leaves for colour. We then arranged the pumpkins, squashes and gourds and twisted in some micro fairy lights, again from lights4fun to give some warmth and interest.

A great night

We finished laying the table, put on our Autumn Jazz playlist and opened some English sparkling wine. It was a great evening celebrating with our friends. Calum cooked pumpkin soup (obviously) followed by a lovely roast pork followed by a delicious orange ginger and treacle pudding.

What do you think?

What do you think of our Harvest Table? Do you celebrate at this time of year and if so how do you go about it? let us know in the comments, we’d love to hear from you.

12th October 2016

Creating a Summer Blue Table Theme

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Orchard Blog

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?

26th August 2016

How to Create a Botanical Table Theme

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Orchard Blog

We are still feeling inspired by our current favourite interior design book Botanical Style by Selina Lake. So when it came to setting the table for an Italian dinner party we had we knew we wanted a botanical table theme. We host frequently so mixing up the styles is fun way of adding a new dimension to each event.

For our botanical table theme we started by heading to our local garden centre to by some gorgeous green houseplants. We picked up a sword fern, a couple of maidenhair ferns and a couple of mind-your-own-business. You can read more about these plants here. We find that using plants can be a great alternative to cut flowers for creating the perfect table centre. More often than not it works out cheaper than buying cut flowers, and you get the added bonus of new plants to keep, or to give to your guests at the end of the eventing for presents.

We placed the plants a mixture of rustic containers that we had collected over the years and mixed these in with some green glass lantern and some vintage glass bottles. We also made some tea light holders in some washed out glass yoghurt pots with a bit of garden twine tied around the rim, economical and very effective.

We’d managed to borrow some collapsible tables to create a big enough dinner table to confirmable sit eight people. These tables are not the most attractive so to hide them we used a crisp white tablecloth. We broke this up with a natural coloured table runner and similar coloured napkins to keep the theme grounded. To continue the green from the plants we uses some green water glasses (purchased from ikea for 50p each). And Rich designed the menus and place names using a green palm leave motif.

Botanical Table Theme was perfect for our evenings festivities. We had a wonderful time!

17th August 2016