Frugal Wedding Table Centrepiece

I am republishing this post so that the details are on my blog.  It was originally posted as a guest post over at Doberman by the Sea.  


I am doing the table centrepieces for my son's upcoming wedding in May, so I took a day recently to do a dry-run and see if the vision I had in my head would work out in reality.  I wanted to share with you how things turned out. 


I started by assessing the basic framework of location, type of reception, and colour scheme that I would be working with.   My son and his fiancé want an intimate informal afternoon tea for their wedding reception and the bridal attendant is wearing a red dress.  The wedding reception is being held in a church hall that has round tables that seat about ten people so we will need to decorate about 7 or 8 tables.  Knowing these facts, I set out to create wedding table decorations that were:

• pretty, but not too formal
• easy to assemble since we have to transport them to a town that is over an hour's drive away
• inexpensive
• low enough that you can see across the table (a pet peeve of mine with many wedding centrepieces)

Way back in November I found some turquoise vases at IKEA on clearance so I bought all they had, which amounted to 54 large-sized ones and 24 small-sized ones.  I liked the fact that they are designed with a narrow part to help hold the stems upright and they would inject a pretty colour that goes well with red (and orange and yellow, which we are also using in the bouquets - you can read more details here).

Look closely at the vase in the picture below - do you see the stickers on there?  There were four stickers on every vase!!!  It took two of us over an hour to peel the stickers off all the vases.  That's two hours of solid sticker-peeling work!  Why, oh why did they need so many stickers?

I did think this sticker on the bottom of the vases was funny though - are we supposed to remember to brush our teeth after using the vase???

In order to do a practice run, I used what I had - which is our rectangular dining room table.  I extended the table to its longest size so that it would emulate the size of a round table that ten people can eat at.  You really need to use your imagination a bit to translate what I did to the final form.


The church hall has white tablecloths - thankfully - as that is perfect for what I had in mind.  I put seven large vases and three small ones in the centre of the table and filled each one with a single stem of flowers.

Initially I had the vases too far apart and the arrangement didn't look cohesive, but it all came together when we clustered the vases in the centre of the table.  I also, initially, put a random assortment of coloured flowers in the vases, but we soon figured out that it looked best with just red, orange, and yellow flowers - no pink, purple, or white.  

I like the simplicity of it and how easy it will be to assemble.  The cost for the vases was about $100 and the flowers will be a mix of tulips, carnations, mums, and daisies - all from the local grocery store, so they won't set us back too much.

I also like how well the arrangement goes with the red serviettes that we will be using at the reception,

and with the little jars of red candy and silver foil-wrapped chocolates that will be placed around the tables - something like this.

The tables will be quite large, but I like the simplicity of the cluster of bright colours in the centre.

And one more picture, just because!

Any changes you would make to our plan?  What did you do for your wedding table centrepieces?  Seen any creative ones recently?