kathleen, 99% percent of my dinners are for only the amount of people that can sit at my table. The only time I have multiple desserts is at a large holiday, and I will still serve them seperate, I give each person the choice of the dessert that I have prepared. I guess what I am saying is that I don't serve desserts buffet style (lack of room which I explain below). I pre-assemble as much as possible of the dessert on the small glass plate or the covered cardboard disk. Then I store the "sets" in a large tupperware container in the refrig. So when I am ready to serve the dessert course all I have to do is pop it on the candle base, and bring out. This pre assembly saves me a lot of stress and time in the kitchen. At the last minute I can add the whipped cream or what ever I need to finish it off, but this only takes moments out of my time. It saves the guest having to cut, slice into pies and cakes themselves. Plus, for me, its a touch of the dramatic, they don't have to lift a finger, I have it all done ahead of time and it makes people feel pampered. I have a few pics of food with people in the shots, but not that many, I kind of feel funny snapping shots when people are eatting. Plus, to tell you the truth, I would never post pictures on the internet that had people's faces in them, to protect their privacy as well as mine. Sorry Don't get me wrong, doing a dessert buffet is beautiful, I think there is nothing more beautiful that a well designed dessert buffet, but with my tiny home, I just don't have the room for it, my kitchen is barely 10' x 8' so it's really a "one butt kitchen" and not only that, it's a ugly kitchen LOL I dearly would love to be able to do a dessert spread like that sometimes, but at this time I can't. So I make the best out of a bad situation and serve seperately. My way of making lemonade out of lemons LOL Here is a really old picture of me trying out my "dessert candlesticks on the table, I had just purchased them so I was just playing with them at the time that's why nothing is in them.

Thanks, Judith. I do have a lot of sage green, so I wanted something different. It is a big room, and I am afraid of the dark color, plus the light from the den might make some of the walls look funny! I will buy some of the small jars and do the squares to test first. Luvs, the berries on the plate are not red, but more a cranberry color. The plastic charger is really RED, and I don't think it would look good, plus I think the plate lends itself to a more formal charger. Later I will play and see which charger looks best! Thanks for your thoughts...you know I wasn't here last Christmas, so it is nice to be able to get some other opinions!

hi bama, painting is almost done. the martha stewart sale glaze looks really beautiful. we start putting down the hardwood on saturday. still in an undecided state about light fixtures. i love the bagatelle pendant (although in silver finish) at link below but it is out of my price range. lowes has a pretty do-able knock off i will look at today. caera is still missing so no pics. have to just bite the bullet and buy a new one. Here is a link that might be useful: bagatelle pendant

Hi Nutmegxo. I see why you're attracted to those last pictures. The fresh colors & nice workmanship make those rooms seem very attractive. However, you say that your house is a center hall Colonial, and those wall treatments derive from Mission and Arts & Crafts style house of the early 1900s, where the whole idea was to create a completely different--a more modern--feel than the Colonial houses of the century before. Oh, sure, you can mix styles all up--people do it all the time--but while a mix of different furniture styles in a single house can work out just fine, a mix of architectural feaures cobbled together from different styles in different centuries isn't often a success, especially when, as in a center hall plan, each room is clearly visible from the other. Normal size doorways with doors that close allow you to sneak the odd painted room into a house full of stained wood, or add an Art Deco bathroom to a Tudor manse, but the typical broad doorways in Colonial Revival houses make using different architectural styles in adjacent rooms a dicier proposition. That's the thinking behind some of the posters' suggestion above. Let's take a closer look at that blue room you posted. Pretty colors, that's for sure. But there are a few things that show somebody missed the bus. One of the things that bothers me is that the door looks like a generic six-panel door out of the Big Box store. These days, six-panel doors are as ubiquitous as were hollow-core slab doors when I was growing up in the 196Os, and like those doors, these are often used where they don't belong. A six-panel door in a modern house or contemporary condo is every bit as out-of-place as a slab door in a Federal style house, and just because they're easy to find (and some people see them as 'nicer' than cheap hollow core doors) doesn't make them suitable. Even if we assume that whever combined a door style from 1760 with a wall treatment from 1900 knew exactly what they were doing--and I'm not at all sure that's the case--they still missed an opportunity to do it well. Look at the door's cross-member. Now look at the upper horizontal on the wall. How hard would it have been to raise that wall molding four inches so it would align with the lines of the door? Or, if instead of painting the door all white, they really wanted to feature the [mismatched] door, why didn't they space the wall's moldings to match the panels on the door? Doing that could have allowed the blue to flow unbroken across the door's lower panels, better integrating the door into the overall look of the room. But instead of going to the hassle of finding a more approriate period-style door--either a five-panel model with stacked horizontals, or a three-panel model with one square panel above two vertical panels--or, if this wall treatment is new, adjusting it to match the door's proportions, they just took the easy no-thought middle course, buying & hanging a generic door with little thought given to how to better relate it to the other features in the room. Those kind of details are the things that, thought about early enough in the process, can make a a huge difference in the final results, and they often cost no more than doing things the same way everybody else does them and coming up with the same predictable results. Good design isn't about money, it's about thinking. But these days, all it takes is a pretty coat of paint to make a lot of people think a room is well-designed. M.