I love the old siver plated trays (showing a 13" wide one at the bottom). This setting has 5 plates. The bottom is the charger (silver plate tray) then a plate with silver stripes from Target, this year's Christmas plate collection. On top of that is a real bargain! At the dollar tree store they have (like a thick foil catering grade at 9 3/4") a smaller silver toned charger type tray for one dollar. I have that Dollar tree tray on top of the silver striped plate, then a white lacy plate, then my green leaf/flower plate. This is one way to add a metal layer when you want more bling to a setting.
Another setting using this 9 3/4" silver toned charger tray.
Picture shows them taken apart. You can see my silver plate tray is starting to tarnish here, IRL the two trays look more alike than in this picture.
Here is the luncheon size with 8" plate on top of that 9 3/4" charger tray, then picture below that takes the setting apart.
And here I used this small tray for a backdrop in my china cabinet, and the best part is no polishing! Helps to reflect light and balance where you might have silver displayed in another part of the cabinet and it is not a symmetrical display.
Thi next picture shows the same cone trees with a set of small LED lights that are made for small village and train set display. I found two sets at Lowe's! They come with one battery pack, about 16" of wire to two small (black box) spot lights. I think it makes the display more interesting with shadows and more texture. 
I had also tried an overhead small light (the type with a nightlight 4W bulb that fits into a night light. but it gave the 8" height-paper houses a flat washed out look.
This shows the cabinet with the houses and the cone trees lit with these tiny LED spot lights. The light bulb is supposed to have 700 hrs. And I have lit these spot lights every night for a few hours each for a week now. They are still going strong.
I am working on my Chirstmas decor now. It takes me longer to work on things now so I wanted to start early. Our living room mantel as was constructed and we beefed up with molding. I took the mirror and items off to start decorating.
This picture below, shows how we made an over mantel shelf cover so the decorations could be stapled, glued, tacked on to stay in place without damaging the original shelf. This shelf was actually screwed (with two screws towards the back) to make it more secure. This shelf is 2" larger all the way around so that things will fit better. Here it is unfinished, the wood is poplar that we happened to have in the garage (left over from another project).
Below: this is the shelf as I stained it dark mahogany (3 coats, last coat not wiped off) I saw a couple of finials at Lowe's and decided to attach them to the corners pointing them down to create more style.
This picture (below) shows a close up of the corner (after 2 coats of stain and not sealed yet)
Below: shows the cut outs that my husband made to accommodate the pilaster and the outlets that we have on that mantel shelf. The shelf here has the three coats and I waxed the shelf after it was fully dry (waited a few days). I used 
I played around with some of the items I worked on last year for the mantel look for this year, you can see how the shallow shelf didn't allow much on there.
Below, another look for the mantel.
We did hardwood flooring in our home and had some pieces left over. We had done some mahgany inserts in the flooring. The guy who finished the flooring for us had some left over boards he gave us, we didn't use them all and stashed them away. Well 3 years later, we pulled them out of the garage and finally did something with them.
DH worked on machining the wood and cutting to the size I wanted. I then applied mahogany stain to make the woodgrain tones more even. When they were dry, I applied paste wax for that hand rubbed patina finish.
