My Tablesetting Fetish
I do not get to indulge it often, but I have something of a fetish for proper table setting. That means that, yes, I learn a new napkin fold pretty much each time I host a dinner party of larger than 6 people, and that I covet someday being able to have something other than the plentiful but plain stainless steel flatware I bought at Target.

Fortunately, this fetish of mine fits well with corwin's love of buying housewares, so now at least we have all the proper wine & drink glasses (red, white, champagne, cocktails, etc...) and he's never complained about my continual search for machine-washable but beautiful table cloths and table runners.

What follows is some picspam of the Easter Dinner table I actually bothered to take pictures of. Ironically, this is one of the table designs I've done where I did not use any of the fancy runners I brought from Hong Kong or have accumulated over the years.

It being Easter and Spring and all that, I wanted something with color, so I used our dark blue tablecloths on the bottom and then folded the lavender one into runner-width and used that. I then used the napkins that matched that one. I used the "candlestick" fold here, as it's supposed to look like candles standing up in the wine glasses, but most people assumed that, it being Easter, they were bunny ears. All art being open to interpretation... I'm fine with that.

One of the constraints of this art, of course, as I mentioned, is limited budget. So I really can not just go out and buy new cloths, candle holders, centerpieces, or whatever, every time I have a dinner party. I did spring for fresh flowers for this one, though, in purple, blue, and white, to match the colors of the cloths. Also, our nice china has a calla lily pattern on it, so a single calla lily, surrounded by bluebells and a blueish purple flower whose name we never quite figured out.



Alternating with the two groups of flowers are candle arrangements. I ended up making three such arrangements that consisted of three candles each, one plain white 'saint' candle, one short cylinder, and one floating candle in a martini glass with water and glass rocks, and then glass rocks sprinkled across each plate.





I had to play with the digital camera, of course, to see how the no-flash pictures came out. I like these photos a lot better! But then you can't see the pretty colors. The human eye was clearly the best way to appreciate the colors and the nice lighting of the candles, dimmer switches, and white party lights.





And of course one of the major challenges is we had twelve people to dinner, which is 2 more than will fit at the actual table, hence the diagonal arrangement of the table and the tacking on of the card table at one end. Fortunately I had plenty of cloths to extended the runner and color all the way to the end.