How to Decorate Your Table & Create a Professional Tablescape

Do you need help to decorate your table, we are sure you have seen those gorgeously styled tablescapes all over tiktok and pinterest. But did you know how truly simple and easy it is to do it yourself!? This is out step by step guide to decorating your table and creating a professional looking tablescape for any event.

Step 1. Pick for Colour Palette

The first step to decorate your table is of course is to know your theme and colour palette. This step gets overlooked by many but is so important to the process. It allows you to plan and map out your ideas and refines the possibilities to your decor. If you’re new to decorating, then you’re likely to be like us and get overwhelmed with all the possibilities. Take it from us, this will help you simplify things a lot! Oh and if you need some colour palette inspo we’ve got a hand little blog post about some of our favourite colour palettes we’ve found for the year. You can access that HERE or even just give it a google search.

Step 2. The Tablecloth

Your tablecloth is so important and can really make or break your the way you decorate your table. If you only take one piece of advice from this article, let it be this. Don’t use a plastic tablecloth, please! The plastic tablecloths don’t do us any favours in the decorating side of things. Your table cloth doesn’t need to break the bank, we go to our local spotlight or lincraft (a store that sells fabric by the meter) and go from there. There are endless possibilities for what kind of fabric to choose and can’t go too wrong with your fabric tablecloth. The main thing with your tablecloth is if you’re unsure about how much fabric to get, GET MORE. Its better to have more cheaper fabric then not enough pricier fabric. You want your tablecloth to drape off the table and to do that we need length.
If you have a table that is 2m long at a height of 74cm you’ll want to add at those together to see how much fabric you’ll really need. For these dimensions if you have a 2m long table you’ll need to (74×2)+200 which equals 348cm if we convert this to meters its 3.5m (when we round up) But don’t get tricked here, this is how much fabric you’ll need for the tablecloth to just hit your floor. We want it to drape so we are going to need to add some more length to this. If we round up to 4m that would give us a leverage of 25cm on each side of the table which would drape quit nicely. For the purpose of this example we are just planning to drape the two short sides of the tablescape.
You should then decide whether a table runner is appropriate for the type of set-up your planning. In most cases it will be and for the sake of a simple step-by-sep process lets include the table runner into it. Again find the table runner at your fabric store, this should be a flowy material that can be easily scrunched up and draped. We are going to layer things on top of this so allow for a thickness of at least half a meter. We would even go thicker as you can always cut some off. Again just like with your tablecloth you’re going to want to order extra length, so use the logic we did for the tablecloth here.
You could also ignore the the table cloth and just add a table runner. If you have a gorgeous table underneath you want to expose or have a limited budget, do this one.

Step 3. Crockery & Tableware

Tableware is so important to the aesthetic of our tablescape, some main things to keep in mind when you decorate your table is that they should all be matching and identical. The same rule goes for our cutlery and glassware. If you don’t have all the major crockery pieces like the charger plates (these can be expensive and serve the purpose of decor) you can use other things to add to your crockery set. See some images below, but if you’re after the charger plate vibe but don’t have the charger plates we would recommend using paper. The possibilities are endless and you can get any theme, colour paltter or vibes you like. Just imaging having a scalloped circular piece of textured paper with florals under your crockery (how gorgeous!?)

Step 4. The Centrepiece

Once you’ve set out your crockery, you’ll be able to visualise what is missing from the middle of your table. Let’s call this our centrepiece and design it based on the length of our table. If we have an itsy bitsy table length we would only need one centrepiece, if we have a super long one however we may need multiple, with no real limit. Its obviously up to you and your preferred style when decorating your table. If you’re struggling on what to put in the middle, the go to’s are things like vases, candelabras, candles and flowers. You want to add height to your tablescape so think about what kind of things can do that. You could add things such as pineapples, little statues and figurines, the fun about decor and decorating is that really, there aren’t any rules. There are design rules of course that help you with your design process and aesthetic but what you use and how you decorate has no rules. Here are some inspiration pics to help you get started.

Step 5. Lighting

This step we believe is totally optional and we know we did mention candles in the previous step. But the candles in this step brings an alternate purpose to just decor and aesthetic, its lighting. Lighting can help your tablescape in so many ways, it can simple help your guests see the decor better, help with dimension and also ambience. Candles of course aren’t the only way to play around with lighting, thing fairy lights (there are so many battery operated ones you can get now) artificial lighting, lamps, and those led candle lights. Have fun with it! We think lights can bring a whole new element when you decorate your table, so if you want to up the ante, this step is for you!

Step 6. Stationary

The stationary might even be our favourite of all the decorating, to us your tablescapes aren’t complete unless you have your personalised custom stationary. We are talking about place cards and menus. Designed to fit your theme and aesthetic and placed onto your tablescape to enhance your decor. Here are some of our favourites.

It really is that simple, you just need a few of the right elements and you’re on your way to a beautiful tablescape. You can really do anything and everything, the possibilities are endless. If you found this article helpful and use some of our techniques please share your images with us! We would absolutely love yo see what you have created. You can message us via email or on our socials! HERE