How to Create a Fall Tablescape: You Don’t Have to Spend a Lot of Money to Wow Your Guests! by Terri Kendrick

I’m a big fan of using what you’ve got, whether it be your God-given talents or those vintage dessert dishes crowding your cabinets. So, after I mined the pages of Pinterest for centerpiece ideas for my fall party this weekend, I then set about reinterpreting some of those ideas with what I already had on hand.

The tablescapes I was drawn to over and over again on Pinterest always had two things in common: they used pumpkins in some unexpected way – to replace candles, candleholders, vases or even a cake on a cake stand – and they were very linear in design.

• Pumpkin procurement. The first step was to buy a bunch of pumpkins to start the creative process. I’ve never been matchy-matchy or rigid about symmetry, so while I definitely picked up a handful of cute, little orange pumpkins, I also bought some white ones, along with some striped, bowling pin-shaped gourds and a thorny, speckled pumpkin (or maybe a gourd, who knows?!) with an exceptionally long, witchy stem.

• Putting it together. After tossing all the pumpkins and gourds willy-nilly into a beautiful green, Depression-glass bowl to get my creative wheels turning, it hit me. I had just bought two green, glass dessert dishes at a thrift store to add to my fledgling collection (I have a thing for old dessert dishes, although I NEVER make dessert, go figure!). I popped one of the white pumpkins inside the green dish and, just like that, I had the beginnings of my arrangement. I pulled out the rest of my dessert dishes and set to work pairing pumpkins and gourds with dishes of varying heights and colors. (This part of the process involved a lot of experimentation, moving things around, stepping back, leaving it for a day and starting over from scratch a couple of times, which I’m sure will continue until party day.)

• The finishing touches. I used a simple burlap table runner, which I had purchased for a long-ago Easter dinner, to serve as the backdrop for the more elegant dishes (I like juxtaposing styles). I also repurposed an orange, wired ribbon from an anniversary flower arrangement and threaded it through the dishes, inserting silk fall leaves from the same flower arrangement here and there. A honey crisp apple-scented candle I had picked up at Trader Joe’s went in the middle, and the whole arrangement was bookended by my everyday silver candlesticks. Voila! 

See what you can come up with. The creative process is half the fun!