Decorating for Fall

I found this pretty silver serving dish at Goodwill for two bucks! Prices marked on other stickers ranged from ten dollars down--apparently it had been on the shelves for a while. It's thoroughly black, and probably just silver plate (which doesn't take heavy-duty polishing very well). However, for two dollars, I thought I could probably find something to do with it.

I think it will make a very nice holder for my fall coffee table decoration! In the past couple years, I've just sort of laid everything out on the table, but this sort of dish will be a good way to hold it all together, I think. And the black patina probably works better with the fall colors than bright white silver would!

I have an assortment of randomness--the two glittered pumpkins and some of the leaves were sent home with me after a friend's fall wedding; the fruits, raffia, and some of the berries and leaves were in a box purchased on sale from Jo-Anns; and the other items are floral picks, also sale purchases from previous years.

I started by piling in the raffia, trying to fill up some of my space, and the floral picks, trying to arrange them in a way that was attractive to me but NOT to my cat, who has been known to chew on non-food items.

I kept just piling everything in, trying to separate most of the fruits from each other with leaves, and putting leaves around the edge to soften that up some.

Unfortunately, I want a table arrangement, not a floor arrangement, so I had to do some re-arranging once everything got into its place. I discovered that it's hard to visually anchor a footed bowl to a glass table, so I put a few of the leaves and berries underneath. That required taking out a few of the leaves from the edge, which allowed the pretty flower pattern on the silver to show.

I also changed which pumpkin was where, just because I like the dark brown one better than the gold one.

Finally, I took the red amaryllis wreath off the bottom of the table, where it had spent a good chunk of the winter and summer. I love amaryllis flowers, but that just made things to busy-looking. Yay for my first fall decorations going up!