Christmas - Setting a Holiday Table

Jean Shea: Hi, I am Jean Shea with Shea Studio Interiors and we are demonstrating how to create a beautiful holiday home, the next step on creating a beautiful holiday home is to create a beautiful table. The first step in that is to set the place setting and to determine your theme. Our theme is going to be gold and red and you do not have to feel like everything has to match, you can only use one pattern. It s a lot more interesting if you mix it up and it also gives you some ability to if you only have partial place settings in one to add to another and extend your set of China. So, we have our place setting, charger plate, dinner plate, salad plate, now we are going to add our butter plate and our butter knife, blade in.

Our knife goes to the right of the dinner plate, then we have our spoon, then we use our dinner fork, then our salad fork and then our dessert up at the top and generally you eat from the outside in. So if you are at a restaurant and you are wondering, grab the piece, the utensil the furthest out for your salad and then you will go with your dinner. We have a water glass and a wine glass and you will notice that the glasses do not match, that is okay. Now, we are going to set the candle holders out and if you have not figured it out by now, it s nice to mix it up because it makes the table much more interesting.

So, I am taking a lot of candle holders that do not match and I am placing them just in an interesting fashion, I am actually running these on a diagonal and actually I want to put the big one in the center. Generally we are working so that we can keep things fairly low, low enough for people to converse, but, enough to give some interest. Little trick to candles, if you burn the bottom of your candle, just a little bit, get that wax wet, when you stick it in, you hold it for a second, that wax will harden and it will stay put. The thing I like to do with the table is I do not want things high, so high that I can not see the person across from me. So I want to have things that are pretty but I want them to be low. So, you can do this at home, I grabbed every little glass vase that I could find in my house and I am just going to scatter them around the table. I am placing the taller vases in between where somebody would be sitting and the shorter vases will be where people are cross from each other. That way we do not impact the ability of people to talk to one another and we are just mixing it up with a bunch of different objects, vases and I am going to just switch this and then we will put some flowers in. We have all of the vases on the table and my assistant Sandy is going to help me and we are going to place flowers in each vase. What I want to do first is just drop a we have cut some of these pieces up, the high berries in the high vases, the low berries in the low vases and we are going to add a flower and a piece of greens to each vase. Some of this stuff you can get right out of your yard, now you could go out and you could pick holly and you could put holly from your yard and just place it in some of these vases. But the idea is to keep it low, so that your company can see over one another and it just adds a little bit of color to the table. Now, we are going to do our napkins and there is multiple ways that you can do napkins. Best thing to do is to start out with the freshly ironed napkin, there is lots of things you can do, I am going to show you a couple of different tricks and if you do not feel like you are that skilled, if you just grab in the center and you pull up and you put your ring like this, you can set that in your glass and let it trail over like this, that is one way you can do it, another little trick is you can fold your, you can fold your napkin like an accordion. You can fold it in half and then once again notice that I am not using matchy-matchy napkin rings, I am using in assortment of different things, just to give the table some interest and you can set that, you can set that in the center of your plate. Next thing, we are going to do is we are going to move outside and we are going to decorate a mailbox, we are going to hang our reef on the door, we are going to decorate our entry and we are going to add some finishing touches.