By Stephanie May of MayDae.com

I’m so excited to be a guest blogger for the ARC this week!  I absolutely love thrifting, and on most weekends, you can find me at the ARC with a coffee in hand, grabbing treasures as fast as I can. With Thanksgiving coming up, I’m thinking about Thanksgiving decorations just as much as I’m thinking about the food.  A beautiful table makes any party or event feel fancy and special, and it doesn’t take a lot to achieve it. 

Before I went to the thrift store to pick out my supplies, I first came up with my color palette.  I chose black, white, brown, and metallic for my theme and set off looking through the store.I started thinking about a tablecloth, and I knew I wanted to do something non-traditional.  I headed over to the stationary and office supply aisle (one of my favorite sections of the store) and found black paper, brown mailing paper, a roll of wallpaper, and a really cool black and white calligraphy practice pad.

To make the table cloth, I used the back of the wallpaper as a base on the table, and then taped it on the bottom where the seam is.  I cut up the paper into squares and triangles (small, medium, and large pieces) and used plain glue to adhere them to the wallpaper.  I did some of the pieces side by side, and some of them overlapping.  This takes a little while to glue them all down, but if you have a helper or two (this is a great project for kids!) it will go very fast.  I wanted the pattern of the table to be unique and different from something that you could just buy at the store and I really like how it turned out!

‘    

For the rest of the table, I was also able to thrift some black ribbon, white candle holders, dried white flowers, a black vase, beads and gold jewelry, black and white fabric to make napkins, and a metallic fluted pan.  I used the ribbon around the base of my wood crate, and for napkin rings.  The gold jewelry and beads were also used on the napkin rings, and I used the fluted pan and black vase to create height in the center for the dried flowers.

I hope that my table has given you some inspiration of how to use thrift store finds to decorate for the holidays!  I love that you can easily choose different colors and textures, and get a totally different feel and look.  I really enjoyed putting this together – thanks so much to the ARC for having me as a guest blogger! 🙂

www.maydae.com