Happy Chinese New Year 2017 – The Year of the Rooster! I couldn’t resist having a little fun at the table in celebration! The Chinese New Year, or Lunar New Year, begins with the first …
Chinese New Year of the Sheep / Ram Party Décor Ideas (With Formal Table Setting & Kid’s Table) + Recipes, DIY Craft & Printable Links
Start the year with this elegantly styled dinner banquet. You can easily recreate this gorgeous setup for your Chinese New Year celebration. Read more now.
Happy Chinese New Year 2017 – The Year of the Rooster! I couldn’t resist having a little fun at the table in celebration! The Chinese New Year, or Lunar New Year, begins with the first …
A tablescape celebrating the Year of the Dragon with Pottery Barn's Lunar New Year collection out now. Benjamin and I worked on this tablescape for a long time with my family who was in town over the holidays. I'm so excited to share this collection with you, Happy New Year!
Happy Chinese New Year 2017 – The Year of the Rooster! I couldn’t resist having a little fun at the table in celebration! The Chinese New Year, or Lunar New Year, begins with the first …
Chinese New Year of the Sheep / Ram Party Décor Ideas (With Formal Table Setting & Kid’s Table) + Recipes, DIY Craft & Printable Links
Flat lay Chinese new year food and drink on wooden table top still life. Text space image. Text appear in image: Prosperity & spring.
This week we're celebrating Chinese New Year, here in Hong Kong. I thought it would be fun to kick off the week by hosting an intimate dinner party for some of my girlfriends. We had a great time picking out decorations from our local market in Sham Shui Po. The shops were full of red and gold and I found some of the shop owners to be friendly and helpful to this naive expat. For our centerpiece, we used gold branches and some flowering branches that we purchased from the flower market in Mong Kok. We then added a red ribbon with Chinese writing in gold to the vase and hung little red lanterns from the gold branches. The little red lanterns on the centerpiece mimicked the red lanterns we hung on the two light fixtures in our dining room. We made our table runner out of sheets of red wrapping paper that had gold Chinese characters written on them. We then layered some red circle cutouts that also had Chinese writing on them and looked as though they had been cut with my Silhouette Cameo I left back in the United States. Each place setting had a little red money packet tucked into their napkin. I also placed a little gold money chest on top of each napkin as well. The red packets are supposed to be lucky money and the money is given out to children from their parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts. My favorite detail of the evening was the little goats/sheep that I tied onto chopsticks and placed in each glass as a stir stick. This is the year of the goat/sheep and I loved that little touch as an homage to the new year.
The Invitation from Olive Branch Design This bamboo tied off card intructs honorable guests to come by the light of their own handcrafted lanterns When you walked in the party room, this is what you saw when you turned the corner. We decided to make this an interactive cooking night. Chinese just doesn't taste the same cooked ahead of time. I probably should have realized how insane that would be, but it was so good and did I say fresh? The gyoza John makes is the real deal. I realize this is Japanese, but dumplings in general are a Chinese New Year thing. And John's dumplings are incredible. As you can see, we love men who can bring home the bacon then fry it up in a pan. Here is Jeff prepping for Kung Pow shrimp. Nanette served up a mixed mocktail drink of cranberry juice, fresh orange juice and Sprite. Jean-Michel and Carla are owners of JMA Classics a hand-crafted furniture design studio. They do beautiful work, and their lantern was no exception to their standard. It was made of natural alder wood and leather strapping. I was trying to confiscate it for the "United States Intermountain Region Chinese New Year Lantern Awards", or so I was claiming to anyway. Uh huh. They are going on to Regionals. They didn't buy into it though, they took it home. Dang! The handcrafted lanterns most honorable guests brought illuminated on the front porch. Our friend, Warren Lloyd, of Lloyd Architects drove all over town trying to find rice paper for his lantern, (someone even sent him to an oriental market to the wonton wrapper aisle- next time try Utrecht or Reuel's. He lived in Japan and studied under some serious Japanese architects, so he took the Finding Nemo in Tokyo approach to his project. We wondered what architectural plans he had for his lantern when he and Jennie were over an hour late to the party...all because of the handcrafted lantern project. Sorry guys! Lantern Riddles were slipped in Chinese New Year envelopes and placed under each guest's plate. This group was a smart bunch and guessed them all! Photographs courtesy of Becky Loveless. Check out her blog for more of the fine details of our party. Thank you Becky for your inspiration to this party in the making for nearly four years, and for coming to take photographs so I didn't have to.
It’s the eve of Chinese New Year, the biggest celebration in Chinese culture. Gong hay fat choy! Last week, I had an article and a few photos in the Toronto Star newspaper and today we have a few more photos online featured on 100 Layer Cake. I’ve included some of my favourite shots and ideas […]
Want to elevate your Asian dinner party? Discover a modern approach to Chinese table styling that's both chic & elegant.
A first look at the latest designer product drops in furniture, wall coverings, and more
Chinese New Year of the Sheep / Ram Party Décor Ideas (With Formal Table Setting & Kid’s Table) + Recipes, DIY Craft & Printable Links
Happy Chinese New Year 2017 – The Year of the Rooster! I couldn’t resist having a little fun at the table in celebration! The Chinese New Year, or Lunar New Year, begins with the first …
Little learners will love to explore this Chinese New Year tablescape set up filled with Asian artifacts and red and gold loose parts.
Julen banker på døren og nedenfor lister vi opp 5 kuverter du kan inspireres av for borddekkingen i jula – fra det tradisjonelle med Swedish Grace Winter til det enkle med Scandi Living.
Happy Chinese New Year! Is it the year or the sheep? ram? goat? Nobody knows! The Chinese word for all three of the above is "yang" which translates to 'horned animal" so nobody is really sure which one it is! That won't stop us from celebrating the new year though. Late last night the decorating fairy came through the house and transformed our Mardi Gras themed dining room into Chinese New Year! There is something a bit odd about eating left-over King Cake for breakfast in China, but I guess this is what it would feel like to be a jet setting globe traveler! Back to the celebration at hand, Chinese New Year is here! We've gone with a color palette of red and black and gold. The buffet is all gussied up in black with gold chargers and lovely red accents like our red fans and decorative fire crackers from Oriental Trading Company. We've also added some garden lanterns that I painted with Chinese symbols and various other Asian inspired knick knacks. The table is wearing red with bands of gold and black though the center. The table is adorned with gold charger plates, black melamine plates, red fans and this adorable flatware with faux bamboo handles (these will be back for any tropical summer parties ahead!). There are chocolate gold coins scattered through the center of the table to symbolize prosperity in the new year! (can you see how these decorations work all year round? Those are the Christmas coins, that came back for Mardi Gras and Chinese New Year, and you can bet your lucky charms that they will be filling my pots of gold for St Patrick's Day too!) We have little black soup bowls for Wonton or Egg Drop soup on small round bamboo-like mats and chopsticks resting atop. The mats are decorated with our red paper dragons (also from Oriental Trading Company). (Pssst....those black bowls are actually salsa bowls and you can bet your burritos they will be back for our Cinco De Mayo celebration. I won't tell anyone if you won't!) I am very excited about my fortune cookie fortune, because it feels like it is affirming everything I am doing here on the blog. It says "You are a fun loving person and will find much happiness." Fortune telling aside, I can agree with the psychology of this fortune! Finding happiness is more likely to happen if you are looking for it -- I can word that better -- If you choose to look for the good and the beauty in this world as opposed to focusing on the negative, your world is a happier place, and you'll find things that bring you happiness all around you. If you believe in the law of attraction this works well, but as I often say, if you don't believe in the Law of attraction and you try this -- spending your time focusing on positive things -- and it turns our the 'law' isn't real, you just 'wasted' all your time being positive and thinking about things that make you happy! I can live with that! We feasted on delicious General Tso's Chicken with mini Kung Pao egg rolls and mini spring rolls on the side. We also had Black Rice with carrot garnish (so mega healthy and delicious! more antioxidants than blueberries!).We scored a big bag of the black rice at Costco! Peggo made the General Tso's from a kit at Aldi and the Mini Kung Pao egg rolls also came from Aldi freezer section. The Mini Spring Rolls are from Jennifer's Garden -- how could I resist them with a name like that? Everything was delicious and we all gobbled it up happily before opening our fortune cookies and reading them aloud. As usual, Evie, my adorable little grandmother declared that all fortune cookies must have the phrase "...in bed" added to the end of the fortune. Evie's fortune: "There is a prospect of a thrilling time ahead for you...in bed" Feather's fortune: "Have patience, it will benefit you....in bed" Peggo's fortune: "Fame and fortune lie ahead...in bed" My fortune: "You are a fun loving person and will find much happiness...in bed" So, there you have it! Looks like another exciting lunar year ahead for all of us...in bed!
Pig out for Year of the Rat.
Welcome to the 540th Tablescape Thursday! Recently Sandra, a lovely BNOTP reader, shared some wonderful pictures she had taken of a table setting she created for a dinner party to celebrate the Chinese New Year. This year, the Chinese New Year occurred on Tuesday, February 5th. Per Wikipedia, the Chinese New Year, also known as the Lunar New Year, is the Chinese festival that celebrates the beginning of a new year on the traditional Chinese calendar. Based on the Chinese Zodiac, 2019 is the year of the pig. Sandra wrote, 'I’m hosting a Mahjong party tomorrow to celebrate the year of the pig. Mahjong
