Tablescapes and Dish-asters

Lots of excitement here in the Blue Ridge of late. I've had to pack up a big bunch of my dishes and emptied my pantry and hall shelves in order to start a Project. You know... those things that are only supposed to take three days, and end up taking three weeks.

This Project was a major one: putting in a cabinet in the dining room to hold a Whole LOT of dishes. Yes, I did already have two cabinets in there, but when my Mom came to me and said she knew just what she wanted to give me for Christmas and would I mind if she had a new cabinet put in... well, I didn't actually jump for joy, but i also didn't let any grass grow before voicing immediate agreement! And well, when a couple of friends from Up North mentioned that they wanted to take the train and come down to visit, I just warned them that the house would be in total chaos, but sure, come on down!

Originally, my Project was supposed to be finished up three days before M and DDCG got here, so I was thinking they might not mind helping me put away some of the Dish-tastrophe. They collect Fiesta, just like me, so they'd probably have all kinds of great ideas about how to get things sorted out... and I'm sure they would have, IF we'd gotten to that point. But, since the weather had been crummy, things got a bit behind and instead of staying home and putting away dishes, we had to go ANTIQUING instead.

I'm pretty sure they were crushed to have to see sights, and look for dish treasures instead of washing and putting away my dishes, but they somehow managed to hide the disappointment. We ended up having quite the house party when another Dish Friend came up from North Carolina. The only down side was that I wasn't able to cook here at home. (Ok, maybe that's not all bad... and they didn't seem to mind.) I had to work on planning out a tablescape for a little shared venture with my Tablescape Ladies, so the Dish folks jumped right in and helped me figure out what to use for my part of the quad-tablescape.

Here's what we came up with:



and a little close up of the centerpiece (and yes, that's a miniature of King Triton's castle from The Little Mermaid).


We each have a different colorway in this cloth, so it seemed like fun to each set a table using our cloth. Candy and Daphne hostessed the event, which published today: