A Guest with... sticks???

Oh, today you are LUCKY!  You happen to be hearing from one of my favorite bloggers, Delia, from Delia Creates!  I nearly jumped straight out of my chair when she responded to my plea for guest posts...  I've pinned nearly all of her recent-ish tutorials (and some not so recent ones, too).  Don't miss her blog, if you haven't been over there yet, because you will be sorry.  Today, she's got a super cute and unique picnic idea for all of us!

I am so happy to be here for Kimberly's fun series!
I love Kimberly's spunk, her sincerity and all the fun interesting projects she showcases.
And... she has a knack for coming up with clever, original series like this one.

We love to take picnics to the park. Most of the time it's a quick batch of PB&J's, some apples and we are running out the door. Other times, usually when my husband gets to go with us, I make a bigger deal of it. And this time I decided to shake things up a bit more with a:

The idea is really simple. Take your favorite lunch foods and chop them up.

Then prep them kebab style onto bamboo skewers.

You can pick up a bag of 100 skewers at Walmart for just over a buck. Make sure you look in the kitchen appliances aisle. At least at my store, they don't stock them with the paper goods or toothpicks.

And they are sharp! In the interest of safety I quickly snipped off the ends with some gardening shears.

Then Owen got to work building patterns in fruit. 

It was an unexpected math lesson that was also a lot of fun.

We ended up with three different kids of kebabs: A savory sandwich one, a sweet fruit one, and a dessert one made up of strawberries and strawberry marshmallows. 

All made up of ingredients I would have packed up in bags and boxes, but now they are all portioned out nice and tidy on easy to dispense sticks. I only used two meat sandwiches to feed 4 people this way too, and we didn't even notice! We had so many yummy fruits and vegetables to choose from.

To keep things organized. I simply bunched the skewers together by type and then wrapped them up in wax paper. The fruit kebab got to rest in a ziploc bag in case it leaked some juice...which it did a little bit.

Then I slid it all in my handy collapsible basket.

When we got to the park I laid out our lunch simply by unrolling all the paper. Ta da done!

The boys loved the novelty of it.

I am sure they ate more fruits and vegetables than they normally do just because it was fun to eat.

We used the plates at first but found that really...we didn't need them. By the end we just grabbed a stick one by one and munched away. We'll definitely skip the plates next time we do this. Less waste is always a good thing.

And...as you may be wondering by now. With two rambunctious boys, did the skewer sticks become swords? I am happy to report they didn't! Phew! :)

The thing I love about picnics is enjoying the nice weather and scenery. We nestled ourselves under the sparse shade of this tree. We have had a late Spring so this tree was still barren...but oh so beautiful.

Once everyone was done eating, I wrapped up the sticks and paper and that was it. Almost no mess to clean up and the waste was pretty minimal.

Then we hit the playground.

All in all it was a great day for a picnic!

Thanks for having me Kimberly!

Hope you're having a lovely day!

Thanks, Delia!  Ok, really, what's NOT to love about this idea?  What a super easy way to add some fun to your picnic!  Kids will love the fresh take on the classic picnic, and there's virtually NO MESS!  To sum up: fun, novel, kid-friendly, mess-free, waste-less, and EASY!  Don't you love summer boredom busters that you can just whip together with things you probably already have?  I'm doing this tomorrow!

*Be sure to check just below for all the fun parties I link to!