Frugal ideas for big outdoor picnic?

[mamamilkers]

We are having our wedding rehearsal dinner in a picnic shelter at a local park. A Thai restaurant is catering the food, but we need to provide the dishes, silverware, etc etc. I don't want to give everyone styrofoam plates but I also don't have the money to spend on fancy china, either, so somewhere in the middle!

What is a nice looking yet frugal way to do this? There will be about 40 people there total, about 1/3 of them children. Today at Target I was eyeing all of the cute, simple and cheap plastic picnic wares they have in their seasonal dept. I also need table cloths and maybe some fun/cheap ideas for things for the kids to do.

Help me out please!

[StrawberryFields]

Have you looked into rentals? That is what we did for our wedding rehearsal, we rented tables, tablecloths, plates, etc and had a pizza party in a bar hall.

[Norasmomma]

I would say a rental, or have you checked the Dollar store, you can get really cute plates, glasses, napkins, decorations, pretty much everything I'd say for around $100. I'd also go look at a fabric store for some closeout fabric for the tablecloths or some pretty inexpensive flat sheets. Also a craft store would have a lot of inexpensive things you could use for decorations. If you did find fabric you can easily use some no sew tape to "hem" the edges, I saw thins once on Rachel Ray's TV show it was all stuff from the dollar store and the table was super cute and relatively fancy. It's an idea, but I say check out the dollar store, I've been surprised what you can find.

[sunanthem]

How about instead of spending the $ on plastic, maybe get the new bamboo disposable plates. They look alot nicer than paper or plastic too.
http://www.bambuhome.com/html/produc...eutensils.html

http://www.nextag.com/disposable-plate/search-html