Give your tablescape a curated look straight from the pages of a magazine photoshoot starting with DIY Thanksgiving table centerpieces and fresh floral decor. Make it about more than the world’s most celebrated cheat day when you add thoughtful floral accents that highlight the atmosphere as well as the food.
Creating ambiance and warmth as essential accents central to making your holiday gathering beautiful may be the easiest part of your holiday gathering. At its core, Thanksgiving is about gratitude, and what better way to show how thankful you are than with a handmade creation that shows intention and mindfulness while adding a little creative flair to your holiday decor?
Traditional Thanksgiving Centerpieces
What’s more traditional Thanksgiving table decor than a cornucopia?
You can buy an eye-catching cornucopia made from wicker, grapevine, ceramic, or another material to adorn your holiday table.
Alternatively, you can bake a cornucopia with refrigerated dough. Simply roll aluminum foil into the size and shape you want your cornucopia to be, stuff the open end with more foil to help it keep its shape, apply cooking spray to the foil, wrap the canned dough around the cornucopia (you may need several cans of dough to get the desired size), brush with an egg wash, and bake at 350℉ until golden brown (about 35-45 minutes).
To finish, stuff and surround the cornucopia with other traditional Thanksgiving table decorations like mini pumpkins, seasonal flowers, fall foliage, dried gourds, and any other decor you feel matches your theme.
Creative Thanksgiving Centerpieces
Let your imagination guide you when it comes to creative Thanksgiving centerpieces.
- Use a table runner to extend your Thanksgiving table decor beyond the center of the table to reach all the way to both ends. You can also use seeded eucalyptus to carry your design theme across the entire length of your dining room table.
- Buy or create a stunning, stylish centerpiece with flowers in fall colors or muted tones. If you make the fall floral arrangement yourself, don’t forget to secure the blooms with floral foam in the bottom of the vase, bucket, or hollowed-out pumpkin you put the flowers into.
- Choose items you can mix and match to use as Thanksgiving table decor for years to come, such as faux flowers, brass or glass candle holders, tall candles, tea lights, faux pumpkins, ceramic white pumpkins, and small gourds.
- Create a personal touch by making place cards for all your guests.
In the end, your friends and family members are sure to be grateful for your effort no matter where your imagination takes you on your table-decorating journey.
Outdoor Thanksgiving Centerpieces
For a unique and beautiful centerpiece perfect for an outdoor Thanksgiving dinner, fill a wooden box, galvanized bucket, apple crate, wicker basket, or another interesting container with small pumpkins, dried corn, red berries, pine cones, butternut squash, acorns, and red, orange, yellow, brown, or white flowers. Wait until almost dinner time to place edible decorations, then leave them after the meal for neighborhood wildlife to enjoy.
Fall Color Palettes and Beyond
The essential Fall color schemes for the Thanksgiving season include everything in reds, oranges, yellows, and ochres. You’ll find the changing colors of the leaves directly reflected in the shades of items from seasonal attire to everyday products in holiday varieties. While it can be helpful to stick with the traditional autumnal hues as a starting point, don’t be afraid to break with tradition and add some vibrant highlights to your seasonal centerpieces.
Brighter colors used sparingly and strategically can add unexpected life and vibrance to standard design motifs. Starting with an easy base flower, like Autumn-themed bi-color roses, you can build on their foundation to add a few daring color combinations that show off your design skills. For more of a challenge, you can begin with less seasonal colors and bring your arrangement into the meal with subtle Fall accents.
For a centerpiece that won’t clash, it helps to start with simple, seasonal colors and work your way out. You can always remove additional flowers and put them in a separate vase to brighten other areas of the house. But remember, even the greatest works of art ever created were the result of experimentation and curiosity. Trust your instincts; DIY Thanksgiving table decor that makes an impression is all about following your passions, design sense, and creative instincts.
Decor – Looking Beyond the Table
From the coffee table to holiday front door decor, each area provides an area ready to be decorated where flower arrangements can transform other rooms into integral parts of the celebration. Tradition is a large part of the Thanksgiving celebration; heirlooms and family mementos that have been part of gatherings for generations often make an appearance.
Adding Thanksgiving flowers to existing centerpieces can give them a fresh aesthetic as well as bring a lively update to the table motif. This is where things get really fun, choosing not only colors that match the table and food but specific flowers which may not include those traditionally used in homemade Thanksgiving centerpieces.
Common seasonal flowers used in DIY Thanksgiving centerpieces are:
- Yellow Daisies
- Roses
- Sunflowers
- Chrysanthemums
- Heliopsis
Though for more seasonally diverse tables, you can opt for less traditional fresh flowers that bring a little variety and lush color to your holiday flower arrangement such as:
- Proteas
- Anemones
- Carnations
- Asters
- Succulents
For trendy creative holiday curators, succulents can be useful for bridging color schemes and themes. They often have muted, green tonality which includes yellowish hues, making it easy to tie them with flowers that will transition into oranges, yellows, and greens. Starting with a succulent-based bouquet can help create your vision of how to make a centerpiece design you’ll love.
Different types of succulents can span color combination barriers and help to transition seemingly separate floral elements. If you’re planning a Thanksgiving that incorporates ideas of sustainability, succulents don’t require much water and maintenance and can be reused every year as the basis of a festive centerpiece.
Plus, for those who want their artistic input to stand out, a DIY Thanksgiving centerpiece incorporating non-traditional elements may be exactly what you need to make it a conversation piece as well as an aesthetic one.
Homemade Is a Centerpiece of Thanksgiving Traditions
Whether you realize it or not, DIY and homemade items are at the core of Thanksgiving; from time-honored recipes perfected carefully in the kitchen to artful carousels of eclectic potluck feasts. Typically, they involve core dishes complemented by the personal twists of their creators. Creatively adding to traditional holiday bouquets can help to harness adaptation and modern concepts in much the same way.
From curating musical playlists to preparing the food, Thanksgiving is a day for everyone to showcase their own creative talents. Whether it’s your personal brownie recipe (we all know there’s a little cinnamon in there) or the secret spices you add to your yams (also not a secret), everyone seems to bring something special to their holiday contributions that are unique and creative.
It’s become an opportunity for those of us who enjoy adding DIY accents to holiday gatherings to really show off our talents and turn the materials at hand into decorative accents that brighten the room.
Thanksgiving Flower Arrangements and Wreaths
It may not seem like a typical way to start planning your decorating, but Thanksgiving flowers can be paired with the colors of the meal itself.
In fact, if you’re already planning to make squash or pumpkin soup, consider preserving the outside of your pumpkins or gourds as the foundation for a DIY centerpiece vase. A hollow gourd can provide the ideal thematic basis for an autumn centerpiece or flower display that looks like an essential part of the table dressing.
Holiday wreaths can also become the basis for the construction and layout of a centerpiece. Positioning a wreath around a central flower arrangement, attaching candles, or tying on pinecones can add an additional design layer that provides depth and elevates the importance of the central bouquet.
Have you been so caught up with the food and other things that you haven’t even thought about the flowers? Can’t think of what to bring? Not sure if you’re even going to make it?
Why not send flowers? No matter what this Thanksgiving brings, we’ve got you covered with flower arrangements for delivery.
No doubt the meal is a holiday centerpiece everyone looks forward to. But designing how the tablescape looks by creating a central floral arrangement that provides a foundation for your Thanksgiving theme can be the perfect beginning to the look of your gathering. It has become a way to add to the overall ambiance, making for a picturesque, beautiful holiday affair that isn’t as much about eating as it is about creating warm memories.
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