Ease into FALL | Set a French Country Tablesetting

I know a lot of you are still loving summer but I've heard many of you are so. looking. forward. to. FALL. Me, too! Like all of you, my heart is already in fall. I'm looking ahead, with great joy, as the season is beginning to transition. While I'm not ready to start sprinkling pumpkins around quite yet, setting my tables with a more autumn feeling is one easy way to move the season along a little. For this easy French Country table, I used an antique French sheet for the tablecloth. Have you ever felt an antique linen sheet? Hand woven, sometimes embroidered with the owner's initials, it's my favorite way to set the stage for a country table setting. Here is the table when I just started gathering what I would use. I filled the little antique French glasses with apple cider to be inspired by that beautiful amber color. {I drank the cider before continuing!} Placing all the elements on the table before actually setting the table is how I look to see if I will love it. It's how I do it, but you can plan your tables the way that makes sense to you. For a real party, I sometimes sketch out the table settings with colored pencils {I do have a little Martha gene} but usually I just put things on the table to "see" what it will look like beforehand. I thought I would put apples in this antique French bowl as the centerpiece, but eventually changed my mind and put a salad in it. My centerpieces tend to be simple. A row of leaves, a few candles, at times fruit, sometimes flowers. For every day meals, or French Country tables, a simple centerpiece seems to work the best, and it's easy, everyone can do it in less than a few minutes! Here is another simple idea with fruit, and one of our new Bon Appetit linen towels. Doesn't this look so welcoming? For family dinners here at home I'm going to do this and put freshly baked rolls on the compote with the Bon Appetit towel underneath. Just for fun, I tried several different ways of adding the flatware and napkins. I actually like all of them. I know that a lot of you layer plates and chargers. At our house, that doesn't work that well. Usually there are a lot of us around the table, and all those layered plates end up being in the way. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE how that looks. In my own real life? Not that practical. And when we are sitting around the table eating, laughing and having a beautiful time together, the last thing I want to do is get up all the time to bring another batch of plates to the sink because it's time for the next course so a new plate needs to be used. So I experiment with napkins and flatware. I love how this looks, with the napkin {actually a towel, napkins are coming soon with the Napoleonic Bee!} on top of the plate, and the antique French flatware crossed over. Here are the same pieces, below, but arranged differently. Beautiful in all it's country simplicity. And this is the arrangement I finally chose. Because I loved the apple on each plate, and I can add a leaf from the garden and write everyone's name on it. Plate and place card all in one! I placed the napkins underneath the plate, with just the bee showing. Which version do you like the best? The bright red apples also went well with the bottle of wine I placed in the center of this long table. Covered in this gorgeous Wine Bag, it's almost a shame to open it and drink the wine, don't you think? My favorite seasonal decorating is simple, easy, and beautiful. I like my tables to be a little quirky. A whole lot beautiful. And have something on them that has a story, or at least look like it has had a wonderful life and is now sharing all that wonder with us.

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