When spring starts rolling round

and the sun starts making a bit more of an appearance than usual,

we are living in the UK after all,

then I feel like picnics are the most exciting thing ever.

Besides a barbecue, which I am also accustomed to - everyone loves a barbecue,

I feel like picnics are so fun and easy and...

I don't know, I just really like a picnic.

So I decided to try and do the most epic picnic I have ever done.

Now, you guys know by now that I never do anything half-arsed.

So, when I decided that I wanted to do a picnic at the weekend

I ramped it up a little bit,

I scoured pinterest for any cute ideas,

I looked at recipes, food ideas, decoration ideas...

And myself and Poppy went to town.

Obviously, most of you may know a picnic as a...

blanket, food and a field.

And I mean that is pretty much all you need in order to have a successful picnic.

You don't need to go as extreme as I did,

but we had so much fun setting it up,

we had so much fun at the actual picnic.

and I honestly think it was one of my favourite days so far this year.

If you have a celebration coming up, it's someone's birthday,

someone's graduated, an end of exams party...

or you just know that there's a really sunny weekend coming up

and lots of you and your friends are all free

and you want to do something,

then I feel like it gives you the perfect excuse to go that little bit more

crazy and creative with how you set your picnic up.

We decided we wanted to do a tree-pee.

I've called it this, I don't actually know if it's called a tree-pee,

but it's a teepee suspended in a tree.

And all I did for that, it looks really complicated, but I promise you

it was actually really easy,

I ordered 10-15 meters of plain white fabric from Amazon.

I guess it really depends on how thick the material is

and what material you wanna buy,

but it really wasn't that expensive

and I can reuse this for multiple things, to be honest.

You could also use bedsheets, blankets...

you don't have to buy fabric especially to do this.

I mean, it's kind of like making an adult den, let's be honest.

You wanna find a location that has a good tree.

If you wanna do a tree-pee, you need a decent tree.

Some trees have like, a horizontal branch coming off of them,

which would be perfect, 'cause then you can just sling the fabric over the branch if it's not too high

and kind of create you teepee from there.

The tree we had, it wasn't quite perfect enough for that

so we actually just used the hollow pole

and we fed a string through it

so we created like a loop and we tied the pole

around the tree, so it was kind of hanging

and then we draped the fabric over the pole.

That sounds really complicated, but there's lots and lots of pictures on my blog,

which I will obviously link below,

where you can kind of see how that's created the shape.

You also don't need to do a tree-pee if you don't want to.

I just thought it looked really cool

and after we've done that, we decorated it, we have-

in fact, I've got some things here.

Because I'm a bit of a party fanatic,

I love to throw people parties, not go to them neccessarily,

I actually already have like a stash of like paper decorations.

And things like this came in so useful for the picnic,

because they're so easy to do, they're so easy to set up

and they're also really easy to attach in a tree,

making it look super super pretty and cute.

And of course, if there's a theme to your picnic, so if it's someone's birthday party,

you can kind of tailor these a little bit more to the person.

Maybe you could have some happy birthday bunting.

I feel like it's kind of all about personal preference, really.

I decided I wanted to make this more of a picnic party,

because most picnics, I feel like, are an afternoon occasion.

I really love that kind of cosy element of like

the candles and the fairy lights and

the evening just kind of was more fitting for that day,

so we did our picnic, started our picnic at about 5 or 6 pm.

And I really really liked that time,

because you get the lovely, like sunlight,

but you also get that really nice, like ambient like sunset

and then you have the darkness,

which, if you're not scared of, like being out in a field at night

or, you know, out right in the back of your garden, then it doesn't really matter.

But, um...

Make sure you take torches because we did not take torches.

Setting up a picnic in the daylight is fun and it's fine, and it's easy,

trying to take apart a picnic in complete darkness

was slightly more difficult.

So, we took candles, we took fairy lights,

obviously battery-operated fairy lights

unless you have a power supply near by,

in which case you could go fairy light crazy.

We had like candle lanterns and we just made it really

kind of ambient and cosy and it looked really cool.

And it just felt so nice because the evening was warm.

However, I would advise you to obviously take blankets to sit on inside your tree-pee,

But I also took a couple of blankets that could be used as like

cover-ups in case it got a little bit more chilly in the evenings.

Always make sure you have a big enough picnic basket

to be able to take food, plastic cutlery,

glasses, drinks, plates...

Um...

Any like serving ware...

I used some slate boards, some wooden boards

and things to sort of lay food down on.

Scissors... don't forget scissors,

because if you're opening all these packets

and you have no way of actually

tearing them open or cutting bits of like paper or cutting string...

You're screwed.

Bin bags.

Always remember to take bin bags to a picnic

because there will be packaging, wrappers, um...

any leftover food that nobody wants to take home,

it's always important to take at least some form of rubbish bag,

because you also don't wanna be leaving anything behind

if you're doing this in a public space.

Matches.

No point having candles if you don't have matches to light set candles.

The amount of times I've been to picnics or like garden parties

and there's no way of lighting any candles

and everyone just ends up sitting in the dark,

using their phone torches, like woohoo.

You also might wanna take with you some napkins and some wet wipes,

because you never know what might get spilled, you might get sticky fingers

and if you don't have access to a sink...

what you gonna do?

When it came to food, I feel like with a picnic

a lot of the time, if there's a big of you going,

you could all decide who's bringing what

and it really depends on what time of the day as well,

because if you're doing more of like a brunch picnic,

then obviously the food might be slightly different,

if you're doing a lunch picnic it could be different,

if you're doing a dinner picnic like we did,

it might also be slightly different.

I really wanted to do a cheese board, because

it was kind of more of an evening time.

And we had things like hummus, like dips and...

I mean, picnic food is, um...

known as being cold and nibbly bits

and things that are quite easy to kind of spoon and eat

like pasta salads, potato salads, coleslaw,

lots and lots of bits and pieces like that,

which you can prepare yourself, of course,

but we didn't prepare everything ourselves.

Poppy prepared quite a few bits.

She made two salads, I made some fruit kebabs,

because they're super fun and super easy...

and Poppy also made some ice lollies.

Make sure you've got a freezer bag if you're planning on taking anything frozen.

But generally, I feel like picnics are quite nibbly bits

so we took a little trip to Mark and Spencer

and we basically just went around and took everything from their like new summer range.

This isn't sponsored by M&S by the way,

they just have a lot of really amazing picnic food in right now.

So we got like, crisps and dips and fruit and

just lots and lots of lovely little bits and pieces

and it was just the most amazing spread of food you have ever seen.

I just wanted to eat all of it.

Our eyes were certainly bigger than our tummies

and there wasn't quite enough of us to finish everything,

but we took empty Tupperware boxes with us

so that we could take any food we couldn't eat home

and, you know, eat it another time.

Entertainment wise.

Now, I know you don't really need any more entertainment than your friends,

because generally, if you have good company,

then everyone's happy and you don't need anything else.

But one thing that I will say is vital for any picnic.

It's a wireless Bluetooth speaker.

I don't know what make this one is.

It's an LG Music Flow. I got this from John Lewis.

But there's so many that you can get and they're just the best thing ever.

I feel like a picnic isn't...

isn't as good as it could be without a little bit of music

just to set the scene, gives it a bit more of a vibe.

And there's nothing worse, especially if you're doing it in the evening when it gets darker,

there's nothing worse than just no noise,

like no sound, it kinda gets a little creepy.

And even with music on, at one point we all got a little bit scared.

I can't remember why.

I think we were really all overthinking every noise we could hear.

But yeah, music - essential.

Another thing I took along with me just for the memories

and because I love it

is my little Fujifilm camera.

Um...

You can take instant snaps...

Snip, snip.

and I took a lot of really nice pictures that day

and I really really love them.

And it was just nice to have, 'cause lots of people were kind of using it and taking turns.

I also took a couple of like small compact like card games,

like there was like Guess the Song...

I also took one game that I think was called Awkward Bag of--

No, Bag of Awkward Questions or something.

The sort of thing you see on Youtube Challenges.

That was really fun as well and it just gives it a little bit more,

especially if it's for a party or something or a birthday

and you wanna add like an element of games into it,

I think that's also really fun.

If you're doing this big style and you've got quite a lot to take with you

the decorations, the cutlery, the food,

you're gonna need more than a picnic basket.

Although it does depend on how big your picnic basket is, I guess.

But we also carried things in cardboard boxes

and then we used those cardboard boxes as like tables to put drinks on,

to put things that we weren't using,

we always had something to put something in.

And I think that was really useful, too.

We used one of the boxes as a main like table inside the teepee

and that went down really really well.

I feel like you could even step this up a notch and do a barbecue,

like a portable barbecue at the picnic.

That would just be epic.

Maybe when the sun is really out.

When summer's in full swing, I think that definitely needs to be done.

I'm already desperate to do this again.

It was so much fun.

I know we went kinda OTT, but I don't do things in halves,

so going OTT was the only option for me and I had so much fun

and I'm so glad that we put so much effort into it