Eating Out is Still In!

After creating a backyard or Lawn space, the next step to having lunch outside is setting the table and setting the tone

Decorating for a nice kids party is easy and difficult at the same time. while I don’t have care much for everything being chic and giving a neat touch to every little fabric I do have to worry that a prop may end up falling on a kid or a prop or decoration will be too tempting for a child to leave it alone. With a grown-ups party or a nice outdoor lunch I have other things to worry about, for example, I can’t decorate the backyard with balloons and invite the book club over. What’s more, if conversation runs short, I can’t inhale helium and squeak out a song for general entertainment, a gag that works great with the kids.

I never realized how very demanding we, as women can be when it comes to creating a ‘festive setup’, until I hosted my first ever party, (it was an exemplary disaster). Since then, except for the rare times when I have stroke of genius, I’ve kept most formal lunches in doors. What really got me panicking was the whole idea of square plates! I couldn’t imagine it ever looking good on my table, especially since every dish and vase I owned was circular or cylindrical. So in addition to not being able to set up a nice lunch in my own backyard, I became inept at setting the table until last year when I found this amazing post on table decorating and table arranging ideas and it occurred to me that the plates were meant to go with my food and not with each other or my center pieces. Since then I’ve become fairly open if not experimental to the point of being a mad scientist with my outdoor summer parties.

I’ve found some really nice layouts online that I’ve managed to replicate to a great degree, here’s a new find below