A painterly spring tablescape

Good morning!

This is what I woke up to on Sunday morning April 25th.  What is this wretched stuff still doing here?  Go away snow – you’ve much overstayed your welcome this year.  Seriously.  The nurseries will start to open in a few weeks or so, and the trees are desperately trying to bud.  So begone lol.

I guess if I can’t have spring outside, I’ll have to have it inside.  Something exuberant and unapologetic, as an antidote to the outside.  The brighter the better.  With a profusion of flowers.  Yes, please!  Well, the brightest dishware I own is Pier 1’s Painterly floral and critters from 2 or 3 years ago.  They should do the trick I hope.

There are four different salad plates in the set.  A squirrel:

A bird:

A rabbit:

And a plunked-down duck:  Love those feet.  Its hard to pick a favorite, and its hard not to smile at them.

The word “painterly” was so unusual that I just had to google it.  Its apparently a style of painting.  It was hard to discern the real meaning of the word – at least from the sites I visited.  As it relates to the salad plates, I think it means the branches of leaves and flowers that make up the insides of the critters, like the squirrel’s tail or the outline of the duck’s wing (above), for example.  If anyone out there knows better, please share!

The dinner plates have a border around the rim of flowers and geometrics in the same colors as the salad plates.  But there is a decent amount of white space in the middle for food presentation.

The myriad colors in these plates give lots of options for what to pair them with.  Blue, green, pink, and yellow would all work well.  For this place setting, I chose an orange placemat and a distressed, whitewashed, charger plate.  An orange napkin would have been too much, I suspect, so I opted for a lineny-beige napkin with an orange-flowered napkin ring.  The napkin picks up the whitewashed color of the charger.

The flatware is my bronze twig cutlery – always so fun.

For the center of the table, I used a table runner with a yellow herringbone pattern, small enough that it would provide a somewhat “neutral” background, and wouldn’t compete with the other elements on the table.  For my profusion of flowers, I had this small vase of orange tiger lilies and some daffodils and tulips in terra cotta pots in my stash.  Faux of course, because, well, you saw the back yard.  No flowers out there, for sure.  A bit of table scatter and some bird salt and pepper shakers…

I thought that there was enough visual interest on the table and kept the stemware simple with some clear crackle wine glasses.  Yes, the top of the wine glass is tilted – more fun, especially for the uninitiated.

A look down the table.

Here is Taz, table helper number 1.  “I’ve checked out every one of those plates and there is not a morsel of food on any of them  What kind of table is this?”

Here is Fox, helper number 2.  “Can I please please please just go outside?”

So was the table a successful antidote to that awful snow outside?  I hope so!

For the second year in a row, we have missed our spring birthdays.  This is the table I would have set for my DIL were we able to gather and celebrate her birthday.  Virtual hugs R.  When oh when will this end?

Happy spring everyone!!

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