Time to concentrate a bit on the table. I wanted my table to reflect Sweden a bit, and to me nothing is more Swedish than Swedish fish! But alas, they are hard to come by in Australia.
I had a little budget to pick up some things from Ikea, but it would be easy to use them as inspiration and make your own. I’ve also made up some menus and labels for the different dishes we’re serving… inspired by Marianne Nilsson’s “sill” design. These would work for any Swedish-themed party and not just Eurovision.
- Fish Poster – A trip to Ikea got me the the centrepiece and inspiration for my decorations. It was quite cheap, but with a few supplies, you could also make your own version.
- Åkerkulla Curtain Panel – another swipe from Ikea to use for a table runner. It would also be easy to translate this into your own design if you had some craft paint or markers and a long piece of fabric or even paper.
- Swedish Menu Printable (PDF) – One column has two menus with headers in Swedish, and the second column has menus with headers in English. If you print this double-sided, you’ll end up with 4 menus with English on one side and Swedish on the other. I used the magic of Google translate to get the names in Swedish… love the extra characters they have in their alphabet… å ä ö!
- Swedish Heart Butterflies (PDF template) – One Swedish-y decoration I came across was the Swedish woven heart. If you’re like me, you probably made the basket version of these for Mother’s Day or Valentine’s day at some point in your childhood. (This place has a crazy number of variations if you ever need to know. And also this fancy version.) With this year’s Eurovision butterfly theme, I modified the heart to make Swedish butterfly wings.
- Swedish Food Labels (PDF) – My food labels are more of the herring (sill) pattern that I created. Again I put the Swedish name large on top of the lines and then put the English translation smaller underneath. The little stands I was going to use to hold these up by the food were a craft fail, so I’m back to the drawing board, but it would be easy to use the old binder clip stand solution. The first link is to the blank label file, but if you’re doing the same menu as me (read: mostly Ikea food), you can also use my filled out cards (pdf).
- Loreen Cubicon – a little figure in tribute to the girl who brought Eurovision to Sweden.