Whispers of the Heart

Hubby is retiring this year after working over 48 years, much of it in the commercial GPS satellite navigation business (think ships, construction equipment, and tractors, not cars). He was there when GPS started. His work sent him all over the world including 44 countries and 4 territories. Early on, I started giving him a flag at Christmas time for every country and territory he visited. (Our sons have joined the same tradition.) Eventually, I had to find a much larger flag stand for them all and that’s what you see here. He recently brought them all home from work and I decided to create a tablescape around the flags. I started with a simple white tablecloth that I bought on Amazon last year. Since most of the flags are white, blue, and red, I decided to use those colors for the plates and glasses.

We use these small square red appetizer plates almost every day for snacks and such. They came from Pottery Barn a few years ago and they still have them, in other colors too. The pattern is Cambria. (They are on sale today, 05/13/20.)

These red melamine salad plates came from Crate and Barrel a few years ago.

I wanted to use a square plate somewhere on the plate stack to mirror the straight edges of the flags. These small square white salad plates aren’t marked but I bought them at HomeGoods a few years ago.

I bought these large cobalt blue dinner or charger plates online at Ballard Designs a few years ago. They were part of their Southern Living collection and they are heavy!

This black glass Starburst charger is called Charge It and they were made by Jay. I bought them several years ago on Amazon. They are heavy glass and a simple design and they work well with many different color schemes.

This black flatware is Ginkgo International LePrix. I have had this set for years but it is still for sale. Not sure where I bought it.

I really wanted to use some napkins that had a travel theme so I searched Etsy and found these last week. I folded a couple more to use as a runner on the table. I love the design! The napkin rings were really simple. I had the black napkin rings and I just attached some world flag pins to them temporarily that I bought onlne at Oriental Trading last week.

These are make do place card holders! I added flags (off of necklaces) that I bought at Oriental Trading to my Olga Cassini clear place card holders. Find your place by country!

I used my red Waterford Marquis Brookside goblets for this table setting. I bought them at HomeGoods several years ago. If you read my blog you have seen this goblet in many tablescapes. I think if I were starting a tablescaping hobby, a set of red goblets would be one of my first purchases. They can be used several times a year. The dark blue acrylic goblets came from Pier 1 on sale last month. I bought them to use on a beachie tablescape coming up but they work well here too.

I bought the flags online from different companies over the years and the stand came from one of those companies too many years ago.

A simple table design, the flags take center stage!

To see 190+ tablescapes that I have created please click here. If you are on Facebook, join my Tablescape Ideas group! Just click on the Facebook Search box at the top of the page and type in Tablescape Ideas. Don’t miss my Tablescaping How-To section at the top of this blog post for more tablescaping tips and tricks.

I put a new tablescape on my blog every week so please check back!