How to Create Tiered Serving Dishes for Buffets

The fact that you don't have fancy serving dishes shouldn't stop you from hosting a buffet and setting a great table. You can create tiered serving dishes with varying sizes of unmatched china dinner plates and small serving plates.
While out shopping at the local thrift store for china serving dishes, look for clear footed glassware such as sherbert dishes to support the tiers. All of these items can be purchased very affordably and reused many times without worry of breakage.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Unmatched china patterns
• Footed clear glass sherbert or desert dishes
• Hot glue gun

1. 
   Tiered china plates.

   Gather china dinner plates and smaller plates along with clear footed glassware. Practice stacking the tiers to achieve a look suitable for the type of buffet being hosted.
   
   Choose the bottom plate of the tiered serving dish and the second tier plate. Remember that each serving dish on the tier upwards should be slightly smaller than the china on the tier beneath to allow easy access to the desserts or horderves being served.

2. 
   Glue and center.

   Apply a thin bead of hot glue along the upper rim of the footed glassware. Center this glass on the bottom plate and set the progressively smaller second tier plate centered on the top rim of glassware. Continue stacking serving dishes in this manner.

3. 
   Three tiered china.

   Apply an additional bead of glue along the bottom of the footed glassware if desired. Use glue only along the top rim if you wish to remove tiers from the buffet table as they are emptied.

4. 
   Tiered china serving pieces.

   Allow ample room between tiered serving dishes when setting up buffets. Note that picture has tiers close together strictly for the photograph.

5. 
   Single footed china piece.

   Create single footed serving pieces by turning the footed glassware upside down and hot gluing the china to the bottom rim of the glassware instead of the larger top rim. Glue glassware right side up when centering on plates to allow adequate room for the placement of food.

Tips & Warnings

• Remember the rule of thumb with unmatched china dinnerware is to match either the silver or gold rims or keep simple patterns together and the more decorative patterns together.
• As an extra precaution, don't stack china plates more than 4 tiers high.

[e-Rambler]

on 11/9/2009 Neat idea. I'll pass your article on.

[bossypants]

on 11/5/2009 This is so much better than collecting footed cake plates (and having to find somewhere to store them)! I love this idea. I think the single footed plate (Step 5) is especially lovely. Thanks for generously sharing such a resourceful idea!