For this year’s Christmas celebration at Friday Night Light, we planned a Kinfolk-inspired dinner party centered on sharing food, fellowship, and love while communing on a long table… thus it was called Open Table: A Christmas Dinner.

The motif was fairly simple: rustic and homey. To stay true to this, i thought of using a photograph instead of digitally designing everything, and in the style of “Instagram-worthy” flatlays. So as you can see, everything was executed organically and only enhanced with Photoshop. (hat tip to Jay Argaet!)

The Process

Lots of the elements here were largely improvised:

• For the handmade lettering (styled in cooking twine!), i unfortunately didn’t have a large enough wooden table around the house to stick it on… haha i totally flipped my home upside down for any wooden surface until i found and finally used the back of an old, unused painting from the store room.
• We also didn’t have red wine on hand, so red food coloring + water was concocted.
• The food on the plate though, now that’s real! Haha. I’d been worrying a few days prior what sort of dish i would feature, but thankfully i was able to get Tita Anne’s homemade pesto sauce and special herbed cheese. My mom even volunteered to quickly whip up the pasta and even styled it so nicely on the plate!
• The date/time/venue was handwritten but all other text added on digitally, for easier readability. The final photo was then color graded to give it a more subdued tone.

On the side are mason jars, a photo frame, tealight candles, and a chopping board. I first experimented with all those elements before settling on what you see in the final photo 🙂

A big shoutout to the Design team Kat, Paulo, and Shek! ‘twas a joy working alongside them + the other committees for the whole party in under 3 weeks, but all this we couldn’t have pulled off without the amazing provision of our God who just gave us what we needed to the overflow!!

As for the beautiful night itself? Check out the photos here! or check out related FNL posts here!

Merry meals were shared. Good conversations had.
And JESUS –the center of our lives– cheerfully celebrated. ❤