Yesterday my crafty colleague Kim Yeager wrote about decorating your outdoor windowboxes using materials salvaged from your landscape. Now let's move indoors and talk about the table.
When I'm having people over, I'm usually too preoccupied with the food to think about the centerpiece until it's too late to do anything but throw something together using items culled from my cupboards and garden. Even when I do have my act together, I'm too cheap to spend much on tabletop decor. Besides, it's more fun to improvise.
Over the years, this approach has resulted in some memorably quirky centerpieces -- and a few best forgotten.
My best: Some colorful fiesta centerpieces I cooked up for my daughter's tropical-themed graduation party last year. I hollowed out pineapples, then filled them with hibiscus flowers (harvested from my patio pots) and tropical bunches from Costco. Even my daughter, who initially thought the pineapples sounded weird, was impresed with the final result.
My worst: A toy-themed arrangement I created for a friend's baby shower. (It looked like the floor of my playroom.)
This Thanksgiving, with finances especially tight, I'm not spending a nickle on my centerpiece. I'm using dried hydrangeas from my garden, feathers from last year's holiday craft project, and arranging them in a hollowed-out tree stump vase I already own. (I put the same materials in a pumpkin shell when I had friends over on Halloween weekend. The pumpkin was more colorful and distinctive than my tree vase, but pumpkins seem hard to come by now that Halloween is over.) Then I'll add a bit of bling -- a shiny gold spray leftover from yet another craft project -- to echo the gold of my chargers.
What will you use to decorate your table this Thanksgiving? And let's hear some of your best and worst attempts at scrounging for centerpieces.
