East Coast, West Coast All Around The Town

Welcome to Seasonal Sundays brought to you each week by The Tablescaper

East Coast, West Coast All Around The Town.

We're painting our tabletops red this week.

My dish buddy Daphne from Tabletop Time came up with the idea

to use our red Poinsettia vintage tablecloths today for Seasonal Sundays.

From San Francisco at The Little Round Table

And from Boston over at Tabletop Time it's

East Coast, West Coast All Around The Town

The Little Round Table Red Stripe Fiesta

Vintage California Hand Prints Red Poinsettia tablecloth with metallic gold accents. A combination of vintage Red Stripe Fiesta and the new Red Stripe pieces produced for the Homer Laughlin Collectors Association by Homer Laughlin China Company.  The dinner plates, disc pitcher and vase are new pieces, the remaining striped items are vintage.  Decorative salad plates and hobnail tumblers from Home Goods, goblets and candle holder from Pier 1, flatware and napkin rings purchased on the internet.

An alternative using different accessories with the same Red Stripe dinnerware. Decorative salad plates, cutwork bowl and votives from Home Goods, crystal stemware is from Vera Wang, "Infinity." Flatware came from Macy's twenty years ago! The napkins were ordered from battenburglace.com for $24 per dozen. The handled cream soup bowls are from my service for twelve of vintage Haviland pattern #60424.

Thanks so very much for coming to visit The Little Round Table all decked out in red.  Be sure to stop by and visit with Daphne over at Tabletop Time too!

Where Do You Store All Those Dishes?

Welcome to another episode of Show and Tell Friday with our hostess Cindy
over at My Romantic Home. Join all the other participants to see what they have to show
and tell about this week.

Probably the most often asked question on The Little Round Table is, "Where and how do you store all the dishes and accessories??" Which got me to thinking about what I actually do and is there a logical plan involved.

Main Entry: store
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: collect and put aside

Synonyms: accumulate, amass, bank, cache, clear away, clear up, cumulate, keep, keep in reserve, lay away, lay up, lock away, lock up, mothball, pack away, put away, put by, put in order, reserve, salt away, save, save for rainy day, sock away, squirrel, stack away, stash, stash away, stockpile, store away, stow, stow away, tidy, tidy away, tidy up, warehouse

Some of the synonyms for "to store" sound a bit "obsessive" ...... well yeah, I'm guilty!  There was a plan when we designed our retirement home out in the boonies of the San Francisco Bay Area.  We bought the land in 2004, spent a year permitting the land and construction details, built in 2006 and moved in the last week of October 2006.

I had a plan for where everything would go and implemented said plan as we moved over several months time from our prior home about 40 miles away.  Then about six months ago I started reconfiguring where things "lived" in the new house.  It's a classic pattern for me.  The actual living in a house for a couple of years, generally dictates where things should really be.

A post about my kitchen last week on Show and Tell Friday showed where my vintage Fiesta is now displayed.  It was in a glass front display closet in the pantry hall, but that's all changed and other things are now on the move too.

My "good china" has always lived in the base of the antique pine hutch, which can be seen on some of the posts from the last few months like this one from November. Great storage, but difficult to get to on the low deep shelves, as I finally acknowledge that my knees and lifting power are not what they used to be.

So now the "good dishes" live in this reproduction French Directoire cabinet, along with some large serving pieces and sets of decorative dessert/salad plates.

Storing all the cups and soup bowls always takes up so much shelf space, so I installed plain old cup hooks to save space.  It works incredibly well and about doubles the ususable space on that particular shelf.

So that's my perfect solution for the "good dishes," still to come are all the other dishes, the linens, the accessories, glassware and flatware. Stay tuned and I'll get to those in coming weeks.

Toile Drapes Reborn - Metamorphosis Monday

It's Metamorphosis Monday again hosted by Susan over at Between Naps On The Porch!  Be sure to check out all the fantastic makeovers listed on her blog.

Two years ago when we were getting ready to put the old house on the market I stripped the house of anything remotely making it unique.  It was in a typical SF East Bay bedroom community that seems to thrive on the sameness of houses both inside and out.  So back to builder's plain Jane it was.  One of the things I took out were the 2 year old toile drapes I had spent a whole winter making.  They covered 4 large windows, were lined and I loved the 100 yards of fabric which I had purchased over the internet for a song.

Last Christmas I was looking for fabric to make some matching tablecloths for four tables that I wanted to coordinate for a big Christmas dinner.  My largest dining table is a bear to find tablecloths for because it is extra wide, 7+ feet long and oval.  Then there was the buffet table, "The Little Round Table", and a 5' x 3' dining table that extends to 3' x 8'.  "That's a LOT of fabric," I said to myself.

And then the light-bulb moment....what about toile tablecloths?  So that's what I did.

Here's a shot of the fabric when it was drapes.

And one of the tablecloths made from the disassembled drapes.

I probably still have enough fabric to make an entire king sized bed ensemble or put it on all the walls of the bedroom or make chair slips for every chair I own ...... but haven't gotten there yet!  The tablecloths were a quick easy project and took just a few hours to put together.

Comment from Christmas dinner last year:

Daughter-in-law - "I really like this tablecloth, the fabric looks so familiar."

Italian glass chargers, Post 86 Fiesta Ivory dinner plates, Fiestaware 2000 luncheon plates, bread and butter plates along with cream soups, creamer, sugar and gravy boat are Haviland.  Pier 1 stemware, flatware from Macy's.

A table I did for a garden club lunch last year:

Quick Change Artist In Eight Parts + Mosaic Monday

If you want to change the look of your table, it doesn't take a whole new set of dinnerware to do it.  This is an example of one basic setting, which can give you a complete new look just by changing out the salad plates.  Of course you may also want to change the centerpiece, candle holders, napkins and the flatware to vary it even more.  For the sake of a quick example here, I chose to just change out the salad plates.

Haviland

And a variety of Fitz and Floyd salad plates for however the mood may move you.

So eight versions of the same table, with another choice for a larger crowd.....mix up the various salad plates in a mix and match version of the table settings.

And for Mosaic Monday over at Little Red House here's today's mosaic.  Join all the participants and submit your mosaic for all to enjoy.