rosemary on the tv

Every year, Aaron and I host 10-15 of our closest pals for Friendsgiving, a full-blown Thanksgiving dinner at our house. While I love making mushy foods and pies, one of my favorite parts is setting the table. This year was no different. Lately, I’ve been sort of obsessed with this website, the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s Flickr account, and want to frame those botanical prints all over my house. I used that look as my inspiration, and created a tabletop with a mix of items I had and only a couple of new purchases to give the table a botanical-inspired feel, with gold accents.

The inspiration:

(BioDivLibrary Flickr photostream)

I placed fresh herbs (thyme, sage and oregano) in a wooden box, used a mix of gold and mercury glass votives, and had a couple of gold and bronze animal figurines scattered around.

My entertaining secret: keep a bag of coffee beans in your pantry. I use them as decorative filler for jars and candle votives. They’re inexpensive and they keep forever, and when you burn a candle in coffee beans, it smells amazing!

I mixed and matched plates from my collection of pottery dinnerware and botanical-print plates by John Derian for Target. To pull the gold from the votives into each place setting, I used napkins with a gold-leaf print.

My flowers photographed pink, but they were actually shades of purple. I used a mix of purple peonies, hanging amaranthus, scabiosa pods, purple alstromeria, mixed greenery,  and fern leaves.

dinnerware // napkins // wooden box // botanical plates // glass spice jars // bell jar and moss ball