How to style your table for Easter dinner using what you have at home

Easter could not come at a better time.

Even if you're not religious, a celebration of rebirth and renewal seems especially fitting during the Coronavirus crisis. Easter gives us all a legitimate reason to take our minds off what's going on outside, put our worries aside for a day  and celebrate with our loved ones – even if it's via a webcam. Better still, it's a celebration filled with bright colours, a big dinner and tonnes of chocolate. For mood boosting reasons, I'd love to go ALL out for Easter this year, but sadly my decoration collection is limited to a couple of bunnies and some yellow baubles. Damn last year's minimalism! Since hitting homewares shops is not an option for the most part, I'm looking instead to interiors blogs and Instagram accounts for ideas to create a festive centrepiece for my Easter dinner that are, crucially, easy to execute using things that I might already have around the house. Here are five of the best ideas I've come across:

1. Create an Easter tree

If you can legitimately say that Easter has decor trends, then this has been the biggest one of the past few years. It's super simple to do, and can be adjusted to fit any size of table. Simply place some cut branches or even a stick from the park into a narrow-necked vase or jar and then decorate it with some baubles. If you can get to the shops, I invested €10 in some pussywillow branches last Easter and they are still alive 12 months on. Purpose-bought pastel coloured eggs are what you'll see on Instagram, but if you don't have any you can use real hand-blown eggs (as fiddly to create as you'd imagine), paper cut-outs or just strips of ribbon.

2. Blooms glorious blooms

  Easter is all about celebrating rebirth, and spring blooms are the perfect way to bring this to life. Daffodils and tulips will instant colour to your table, hyacinths bring delicious perfume, while white lilies are the traditional Easter symbol. Arrange them in a jam jar wrapped with twine or a teapot for a stylish change to a vase. Some people just place individual buds into egg cartons, which is surprisingly effective with the right blooms. If you bought into the trend for glass domes/bell jars, fill a teacup with flowers and then place it under the dome for a professional finish. If you prefer to leave your flowers growing, a pot of miniature daffodils is just as effective and more sustainably-minded.

3. Mix and match

Channel your local hipster cafe by mixing and matching your plates, cups and saucers. Old china sets are best and mismatched floral patterns are ideal for creating country cottage charm. You can take this a step further by layering together different table clothes, silk scarves or pieces of fabric to create a table cloth. Pastel colours and floral patterns are best, but just use anything you have – to fully embrace this look more is more.

4. Go minimal

If busy patterns do your head in, don't worry – you can still create a really effective Easter display using a more minimalist aesthetic. Choose all white dishes for your table and then place a jar of colourful sweets in the centre for a pop of seasonal cheer. Simple, stylish and focused on sugar, what's not to like?

5. Get personal

Even in the midst of a pandemic, most of us don't have a lot of spare time to start making our own front-door wreaths or other Easter hand-crafts. If you want to make the kind of effort that can be successively put together in under an hour, consider decorating eggs to use as personalised place settings. The interiors gurus have gold paint to artistically fleck onto their duck egg shells, but the rest of us can just use anything that's to hand: paint, markers or even nail varnish. In an ideal world you'd hand-blow the eggs so you're just left with the empty shells (still fiddly to do) but the easy route is to hard-boil them first. If you don't have egg cups, shot glasses work just as well.