Edmonton Journal

Bring spring to your Easter dinner table

Bon appétit with pastel-coloured linens, fresh blooms and egg nests

- Susan Semenak

Think past the muck of late March and ahead a few weeks for inspiratio­n for an Easter table setting. Create a spring theme by layering pastel colours, floral prints and bouquets of blooms.

For table linens, borrow the yellow, turquoise and melon-coloured sherbet tones from this season’s fashion colours and pair them with fresh flowers and trailing vines.

Bring in bunches of budding branches, such as cherry blossoms, pussy willows or yellow-blossomed forsythia and set them in a tall vase on a side table.

Fill diminutive six-ounce soft-drink bottles with individual blossoms — tulips, daffodils or ranunculus, for example.

Not into florals? For the dinner table centrepiec­e, set a row of twiggy bird’s nests along the middle of the table and line them with green moss and an assortment of real eggs: speckled quail, sand-coloured guinea hen eggs and pale blue duck eggs.

Or transplant store-bought potted herbs into small clay pots and stand one at each place setting.

We found beautiful white dinner and dessert plates with scalloped rims, brightly-coloured patterned Asian bowls, yellow damask-print napkins and handmade turquoise pottery coasters from Anthropolo­gie (anthropolo­gie.com). We layered them with turquoise embossed dinner plates, also from Anthropolo­gie.

Our yellow linen tablecloth is from Crate & Barrel (crateandba­rrel.ca). So is the moss we used to line the birds’ nests, and the yellow luncheon plates.

We went to Indigo (indigo. ca) for decorative birds’ nests and for green stamped-glass drinking goblets and shallow Portuguese bowls in matte yellow.

Miniature soft-drink bottles for arranging tulips are sold, filled with Italian bitters and carbonated drinks, at Italian grocery stores.

 ?? Peter Mccabe/ Postmedia News ?? A spring-themed table set for Easter dinner features nests filled with eggs, miniature soft-drink bottles with tulips and ranunculus flowers, pastel-coloured table linens and patterned dinnerware.
Peter Mccabe/ Postmedia News A spring-themed table set for Easter dinner features nests filled with eggs, miniature soft-drink bottles with tulips and ranunculus flowers, pastel-coloured table linens and patterned dinnerware.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from Canada