Simple Yet Elegant Coffin Place Settings

 

 

When one thinks of Halloween, there are always themes that are tried-and-true.  Traditional themes like vampires, ghosts and goblins, mummies, Frankenstein....et cetera have been around for years and years.  For this year's Halloween tablescape, I thought it would be great to have a mini coffin at each setting designating guests where to sit.  I wanted to add a bit of elegance to the coffins, and I did so by adding fabric liners to each.  Here is my process:

 

You will need:

 

Mini coffins

Black spray paint (contingent upon stock of your coffins)

Dark red fabric such as velvet or a very wide ribbon of the same color

Matching embroidery thread

Quilt batting

Plastic mesh needlepoint canvas

Scissors

Hot glue gun and glue sticks

Sharpie pen or crayon

Piece of paper

 

I began this project with several mini coffins from my local Michael's Crafts.  These coffins were plain and ready to paint.  Michael's does offer a pre-painted version, but they only had one in black, and I was a little pressed for time, so I didn't want to order or drive an hour to the next location.  I digress....

 

They are cute, aren't they?  They are available in different shapes, but I preferred this traditional coffin style.

 

I spray painted them all black.

 

 

Once the painting was done, I laid the coffins on the needlepoint canvas

 

and drew a template using a sharpie pen.

 

Trial and error tip:  I found that tracing with the sharpie pen made the template too big of course, because the canvas needed to fit inside.  It took a bit of trimming down with the scissors to get the canvas just the right size.  After using the sharpie to complete the first, I found that using a crayon to sketch over the opening of the coffin and using that as a template instead was a much more accurate method.

I used the first of these to template as many others as I needed, making sure to cut out each template first a little larger, and carefully trimming where needed.  You can always take more away....you can never put it back!  :)

 

Once all my canvases were complete,

 

I wanted to give each lining a little oomph by adding quilt batting.

  I cut out a piece of batting for each,

 

and trimmed them to size.

 

I laid each piece on my wide ribbon,

 

and using a coordinating embroidery thread,

 

added tufts to the lining by placing little knots sporadically down the length of my coffin template.

 

 

This process turned out to be really time-intensive, so in the end, I omitted this step.  Also, if you look at the top of my liner here, the tufts are almost not noticeable.  I believe if you'd like to keep this step, the tufts would show up better if you used a contrasting color like black.

 

 

For the last step, I folded in and hot glued all the sides down just before placing each liner into its coffin (with the uglier sides facing down).

 

It was easy to give some plain coffins a bit of added elegance, and in addition to place settings, these could be used as invitations as well for a Halloween wedding or soirée....or any fabulous macabre get-together!  To see these featured in my 2015 Día de Los Muertos Halloween Tablescape, you may visit the post on my blog Parsimonious Décor Darling here.

 

 

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