Holiday Dough Bowl Styling Ideas

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Do you have a dough bowl but need some inspiration on how to decorate with it? Let me show you a few quick tips for decorating with wooden bowls!

Dough bowls-everyone loves them, but how do you style them??? Let me share some of my favorite tips and ideas for decorating with bowls for the Holiday Season! Of course, you can also use these same tips and techniques throughout the year!

What is A Dough Bowl Anyway?

Dough bowls get their name from their original purpose: making bread dough! An antique dough bowl was a great place for the bread dough to rise as the wood helped retain the heat which in turn helped the dough rise. Every kitchen had a least one dough bowl and they were often times handed down through the generations. Antique dough bowls are also sometimes referred to as trenchers. Now, instead of being used to actually make dough, they have become a decorating staple especially for Farmhouse decor.

Dough bowls come in a variety of shapes and sizes. The most common shapes are the oval and round. I normally keep an oval 20-inch-long dough bowl on my gathering room coffee table. I love to decorate it for the seasons. I believe mine is a reproduction but there are still many antique ones available.

Whether your dough bowl is a true antique or a reproduction, the principles behind decorating it are the same. Your personal style is one of the main things to consider. If you like something and it makes you happy, then use it to decorate your dough bowl. Having a dough bowl makes creating a stunning seasonal centerpiece so quick and easy! Since moving to Florida, I have often incorporated shells in the dough bowl centerpiece. Some of the shells were collected by my grandmother when she & my grandfather used to vacation in Florida in the late 1950s and early 1960.

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In the dough bowl arrangement pictured above, I used shells, vintage Christmas ornaments, a battery candle and pine picks. The battery candle has a mosaic glass look to it and the colors of the Christmas ornaments compliment the colors in the candle. I originally made this for the Autumn season. The step-by-step instructions can be found here: Imagination & Spray Paint to the Rescue

I was able to quickly transform this arrangement to a more Christmas or Holiday arrangement by simply adding a few more elements. The little packet of post it notes is a really nice touch, don’t you agree?

Speaking of Florida, this is probably a good thyme to introduce myself if you are new to my blog. I am so happy to meet you! I am a transplanted Mid-Western. I sometimes say I am a Zone 6 girl living in a Tropical location! If you are a gardener, you will know what I am referring to when I say Zone 6. Another way to describe my interests is that they range from flowers (a former florist) to flour (a former pizzeria owner) and many things in between! My name is Kimberly or Kim and I call my decorating style “Kim” Style!

I like to use thyme instead of time when I am writing! My entrepreneurial journey started many years ago when I first started growing and using herbs. My journey is detailed in Sprout, Grow, Bloom.

I love dough bowls so much; I keep adding more to my collection! This rectangle one is also a reproduction. It is approximately 17 inches long and 8 1/2 inches wide. The width made it easy to decorate. This one is can be quickly turned into a holiday centerpiece just by adding some seasonal battery operated candles. To be completely honest, I don’t really care for the carving or the distressing but most of it will be covered up by the design elements!

My cousin’s wife received a set of these adorable Snowman battery operated candles for Christmas one year! I fell in love with them but got busy and completely forgot about them until I saw them again at their house this past Thanksgiving! I found them on Amazon and bought them as an early Christmas gift for myself! I do things like that a lot! I will put a link to them at the end of the post if you are interested in them! They come with a remote control too! And the “wicks” move so they look just like real candles!

three adorable battery candles with snowman motif

The dough bowl centerpiece looks fine like this. I decided to add a few more elements. This whole process took about 15 minutes. It probably took me longer to put the batteries in the candles! The carving/distressing isn’t nearly as noticeable now that the candles are in place. As an aside, I do love to decorate with snowmen. When I lived in Illinois, I left them out all winter. I can leave these out until Valentine’s Day.

rectangle dough bowl with snowman battery candles

Another seasonally appropriate way I decorated this rectangle dough bowl was to use sand dollars. See how the sand dollar has a design of a poinsettia on the back of the shell? More information about the symbolism found on the sand dollars can be found in a post I wrote earlier this year: The Legend of the Sand Dollar

sand dollar with "poinsettia " side up, displayed with a shell ornament

Dough bowl decorated with sand dollars & ornaments

Almost Antique

I also have a hand hewn one that is round. Since the bowl is hand carved, the sides have an interesting texture. The bowl is not perfectly round, either. These features add character to the bowl and to the arrangement. Having been hand carved in the early 1980s, this one would be considered vintage. To be considered a true antique, the dough bowl would have to be over 100 years old. I am not fortunate enough to have any that old.

This round bowl belonged to my mom. I have designed several different centerpieces using it. I made an armature out of aluminum wire and designed a winter centerpiece. I displayed it on an old porch column. The details can be found here: How to Make an Armature for Use in a Dough bowl

Winter dough bowl arrangement on pedestal

More Dough Bowl Inspiration!

This shallow white dough bowl is so cute it doesn’t even really need decorating! I did come up with 4 different ways to style it for the winter holidays. It may be a little hard to see how cute it is in the photo below. It is standing behind the spindles. It is another reproduction one. I fell in love with the shape of it. I do wish it was a little bit deeper and a tad longer. It is so cute and I just love the “wings”.

Let’s start off in the kitchen. Since it is Christmas thyme , I created a gingerbread themed dough bowl.

Another way it to create a dough bowl display for the dining room. Our inside dining table is glass topped and octagon shaped. Using my white bowl again, I combined a battery candle, jingle bells and pinecones. I do have plans to give this dining room table a complete makeover just as soon as the humidity lessens!

Just going to sneak this in here – when we lived at the farm, we had an actual dining room with an oak dining table that had several leaves. I sometimes used a slightly different kind of dough bowl as the centerpiece. It was called a dough riser. This one had three sections so you could have three balls of dough rising at the same time.

Here is a third option for the white dough bowl. We have a screened in entryway that I decorate seasonally. My husband found this adorable metal camper at Aldi’s last summer. It looks a lot like the one my grandparents had when they used to vacation in Florida. Somewhere I have a picture of my grandpa sitting in a lawn chair in front of their camper. Of course, I couldn’t find it to include it in the vignette!

The fourth way I used it was for a coffee table dough bowl display. Continuing with my gingerbread theme, I designed this Snowflake Wishes and Gingerbread Kisses white dough bowl.

A Few More Shapes of Dough Bowls!

This dough bowl is 16″ x 16″ and 4 3/4 inches deep. The inside is unpainted while the outside has been painted an off-white color. This dough bowl is a reproduction piece that I purchased at a vendor fair.

This centerpiece is a true example of my decorating style. Here I am incorporating architectural salvage “gingerbread” spindles into the centerpiece. I explain the logic behind my choice in this post: A Very Merry & Unique Style of Gingerbread

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One Last Idea

Sometimes I even combine my two passions: dough bowls and dish gardens! Here is how I made a simple winter display of poinsettias in an extra long dough bowl! All of the details can be found here: A Mid-Winter European Dish Garden

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Comments

Cara says

July 14, 2023 at 4:21 pm

I love how you always come up with new dough bowl ideas Kim! Do you know I do not actually have one, but I always love how folks decorate with them. Maybe one of these days I will come across one for our home!

- Kimberly Snyder says
  
  July 17, 2023 at 2:14 pm
  
  I think you definitely need at least one dough bowl! You will love decorating them!