Last Thursday night, I attended the "Stylist's Secrets to Fall Design" event with Eddie Ross at Terrain at Styer's. Terrain is the totally cool store that is owned by the Anthropologie people. There is only one Terrain store in the country, and, lucky me...it is about 20 minutes from my house.
I first learned about Eddie when he was on the Bravo channel's Top Design show. Since then, I've been following his blog. When I read that Eddie and his partner, Jaithan were doing an event at Terrain, I emailed them to let them know that there were a lot of great antique stores near Terrain (including Brandywine View, of course). They ended up going to the shop on Thursday. Yay!
Here's Eddie giving us some ideas on decorating a tablescape and using fall vegetables for entertaining and floral displays:
One of my favorite tips was using a gooseneck gourd to hold a dip and vegetables. My damn camera battery died, so I didn't get a picture of the finished product. But you lay the gourd on its side (like a sleeping goose, if a goose slept on its side). Then, hollow out the big part of the goose (give your goose an appendectomy) and hollow out the bulbous part at the top of the gourd (that would be a goose lobotomy). So, it is similar to hollowing out a squash, but there are TWO places to hold your dips or hummus or crudite. And they used chalkboard plant stakes to write the name of the dip. I love that idea.
As part of the price of admission, we each created our own floral arrangement using a pale bluish-green pumpkin. Four people each shared a project table that was set up with a pre-carved pumpkin filled with a piece of floral foam, along with the supplies that we needed. AND THERE WAS WINE! Which explains why they already hollowed out the pumpkins for us - they obviously didn't want anyone handling sharp knives.
There were two flower carts filled with a huge variety of flowers. We could pick any flowers we wanted for our arrangements: hydrangeas, stock, scented geranium, scabiosa, and lots of other fancy flowers whose names I don't know. It was interesting to see how different everyone's pumkpins ended up looking.
Eddie and Jaithan were so gracious and funny. They floated around the room and helped all of us with our arrangements. I am terrible at flower arranging, so they both helped me make my pumpkin look less like bug with antennae and more like a pleasing autumn centerpiece. The Terrain employees were so friendly, too. They kept the wine flowing and made sure that we were all having fun. Here I am with Eddie:
One of the highlights of the night was meeting Janine, who is a reader of freshvintage. She has a booth at Heritage Antique Center in Adamstown, PA. I will definitely stop there next time I hit Renninger's. Start that blog, Janine!
I met a few bloggers, too: Amy, Shannon and Lizzie. Lizzie was smart enough to have a camera with a charged battery in it, so check out some photos on her blog. She's even got a photo of a lobotomized goose stuffed with orange peppers and bean dip.
And here's my final product, sitting on the barn wood hutch in my family room:
Thanks, Eddie & Jaithan!



























