Workshop Whirlwind

Today, my friend Charlene and I welcomed 20 guests to our Thanksgiving Workshop, which I talked about in this post last week.  We shared our decorator secrets to building a beautiful buffet table, along with a tutorial on how to created a unique, fresh centerpiece that will wow your family and friends.  What a whirlwind of ideas, discussion, laughs and fun in one hour on a brisk fall Friday!

We started out by welcoming everyone to our empty table.  Adorned with only prop boxes and a table cloth, we began teaching how to build a layered table that encompasses some very basic concepts in design, like rhythm, color, scale and texture. (The smaller cloth along the bottom was just meant to hide our supplies).

Part of our happy crowd -- thank you, ladies, for being such enthusiastic participants...

Charlene started with our inspiration -- the centerpiece.  She demonstrated all the steps to building a gorgeous arrangement -- from the framework of greens all the way through to her flowers in the end, much like what I did in this tutorial.  Like me,  Charlene loves using greens from her yard and used her own shrub ivy and dwarf rhododendron,  along with a mix from the market of green and purple fall cabbages, miniature pumpkins, and dried corn.

It was difficult to capture just how insanely gorgeous her arrangement became (she's a trained floral designer).  I'm missing several images of all the steps we did in this workshop, as our photographer was ill, and even though  I filled in along with the staff at Terrazza, the shop that hosted us,  we didn't get it all.  Next time!

Once the centerpiece was in place, we layered a fall inspired fabric remnant over the boxes, creating the base for the different heights of our elements (or rhythm, in design).  Mismatched candles sticks with burnt orange candles added extra height, and then we went to work setting out all the platters and casseroles, to show how to plan where your food will be.  Next we filled in the empty spaces with greens, pumpkins and lots of floral stems.  Here are some shots of how it all turned out...

 
We took time all the way through and at the end for a variety of questions.  A great one was "do my serving dishes need to match?"  Our answer was a definite "no" as most of the time, when the food is in them, you don't notice the color or pattern.  That said, we also suggested that you can use your serving pieces as inspiration for your color palette.  Here we used plain stoneware and patterned fabrics.  You could do the opposite for a great look.

I wish the images could convey the fun and laughs we had today, and how the table really looked as your eye took it all in without the visual chaos of the shop's beautiful things all around us.   I plan to do many more workshops in the future, and I'm certain Charlene will be joining me for some of mine, and I'll join hers, as well.  We both have a passion for sharing what we know, and have a lot of fun along the way!  I'll let you know when we're on the road next.

What kind of table will you be creating this Thanksgiving week?

Talk to you soon,

Carol