Raven and Sparrow

There were only orange lilies

As I swooped into the grocery store late Saturday afternoon to buy food and flowers for my upcoming dinner I was hoping tentatively for white daisies...something simple that would go with lots of my summer tablecloths. No such luck. The selection, not good lately at any time, was skimpier than usual and distinctly tired. The only flowers that looked perky and summery were orange asiatic lilies. I mentally visualized my tablecloth inventory and thought there was probably something that would look good with orange, so home they came.  There were only four sprays of mostly buds that rattled about even in a smallish vase. Adding madrona leaves from the tree next to the house echoed the substantial starburst shapes of the flowers and reminded me of the tropics...an appropriate image for summer. The runner I had envisioned in the store looked insipid with the bold flowers, but I found a wool scarf that stood up them and the table came together. Sometimes the whole process is a seat-of-the-pants undertaking very much dependent on what I find and what I have. 

One fun element of this table was the chance to use the funky brass and wood flatware that Mike's brother brought back from Thailand when he was serving in the Coast Guard in Vietnam...1969 I think. He recently found the set during a move and offered them to me. Since he and his wife were the guests at our party it seemed like a good time to break them out.

Becky's table...taking stock

After months of distraction I am getting ready to tackle the last season for Becky's table...spring. Her dishes,(Keralia by Arabia) with their grayish ground and heavy black/brown banding, lend themselves more to autumn and winter than summer and spring. Plates with strong character often are difficult to adapt to various settings but my challenge is to represent all four seasons with the same dishes, so I must work with these. I was lucky in finding a kantha cloth with the right color background for summer and a wool scarf for fall. The winter cloth I made is documented here in the blog. (I never have had good luck linking to my own posts.)  For the spring cloth I settled on the robins egg blue cloth in the background, a change from the white cloth I usually start with. I thought I could discharge a pattern onto the blue but I have also been wondering if applique might work better. I need to keep the colors springy without compromising the relevance of the plates. Cleaning the studio yielded the dark brown print, a gift from my quilter sister-in-law Lynne. There isn't very much of it but both sides look good. Using it in the right proportions will be the trick. I have been making very short runners lately but this time I think I need a long one...90 inches. That means piecing even the blue, which reminded me of the woven square I did for Dee's Hearts for Charleston quilt. I am imagining woven insets in this long runner, which would allow me to ration the brown effectively. It will make a more graphic pattern than I had first envisioned, but it might be a good variation, given the other cloths I already have waiting. I am going to plan the woven pieces and then let the runner tell me where to go from there.

Change adds life

My cousin is coming for dinner tomorrow and the table is set. The flowers dictated the cloth and color scheme for the table and the choices were few. Our local Safeway recently "enlarged" its floral department and ever since then it seems like the pickins are slim. I wish I had more flowers growing here. There will be only four people present so I put the flowers at one end and lined up candles and my little porcelain leaf dishes down the middle. It makes the table seem shorter and more intimate, I think. Everything on this table has been in my collection for quite a while and I found my interest in setting it a little low. It is so easy to slip into patterns and just repeat what I have done before. Sometimes that works well when time and resources are short, but it reduces my pleasure in making the arrangements. Been there, done that. At first I used my clear glass tumblers...my usual choice....but then I realized that greens of all shades and values made my palette and remembered the dark green Morgantown stemmed glasses I got three years ago for Thanksgiving. Just making that switch cheered me up and injected more life into the table. The darker greens look more like high summer to me.

One of the things I am always trying to do is make my settings simpler and more interchangeable. I don't want to have to buy something every time the season or some other element of my party shifts. That said, I have to admit the charm of novelty, mostly because new things require new judgments and choices. Pleasing myself is admittedly a big part of why I do this stuff. I really like re-combining things. Sometimes I need the spark of the new.

Here are the same tablecloths, plates and candles in use last spring, with clear glasses and blue napkins.