Thanksgiving Flowers

We aren’t having Thanksgiving dinner at our house, but my oldest and his girlfriend are coming in for the holiday/weekend, so I wanted to do some pretty flowers on the counter.

I have some really interesting branches that I cut off my curly filbert earlier this year that I have been dying to use for something and I decided that this was the weekend. First, I selected a vintage stoneware crock–perfect color for fall–and I cut Oasis floral foam to fit. I had to do two layers to get it all the way to the top of the container. Then I filled the crock with water and let it soak for about 10 minutes and drained off the excess. Then I put the branch into the foam.

As I have been tending the fall vegetables, I have been thinking that my lacinato kale is really so pretty, so I cut a plant and brought it into the house.

I pulled some of the largest leaves off of the kale and a placed the kale stalk and a couple of leaves in the floral foam.

While I was outside playing with my dog, I noticed that I still had some stock plants growing, so I cut those and put them in as well–their leaves have such a lovely texture.

I went to Trader Joe’s and picked up some more flowers and here is the final result.

The second flower arrangement is the metal Thanksgiving turkey that I arrange flowers in every Thanksgiving for my mother in law’s kitchen table–it’s a tradition.

I started with soaked floral foam.

Then I went out to the shade garden on the north side of the house and clipped some dried astilbe flowers to use as the “downy” feathers around the edge of the container to hide the floral foam.

Next, I added some kale leaves (that I trimmed a little so the proportion was right) as the wing feathers and tail feathers.

I finished the arrangement with flowers (mums and hypericum berries) from Trader Joe’s.

For our table here at the house, I started with a natural color linen hemstitched tablecloth and log slices. I put some vintage apothecary bottles on the log slices and filled them with a few flowers.

I knew that I would have flowers left over from all of this, so I also bought some bi (tri) color roses (my mom loves them) and made an arrangement for my her.

That’s all for now. I hope that your holiday preparations are going well.

Tomorrow, I will post photos of our Thanksgiving table at my in-laws house.