No one likes to save money. Having all that extra money in the bank for the honeymoon - just awful. Nope. It's about delegating absolutely everything you can to a business and doing the same as everyone else. No personal touches here, no thanks!
Okay, jokes aside, you can save thousands on your wedding by doing as much of it as possible yourself. I mean, except being your own registrar...
The things you can do really depend on how much time you have, and your willingness to learn a few skills to get ahead. For example, here's what we use:
Canva for anything to do which involves designing
- Wedding invitations (get inspiration from Pinterest).
- Wedding stationary.
- Large posters on easels.
Your local printer for printing your designs
- Your local printer is likely cheaper in the long term, as they will address any issues before you invest in 100+ invites and realise there's a typo or it isn't central. No one wants to guillotine 100 invites.
- They will be able to make some design suggestions (as they see customers come to them every day with similar items).
Craft shops (and the like) for wedding favours
We used seeds and asked our guests to grow their flowers everywhere, and to remember our special day when they watered them. My aunt still has her flowers many years on.
We bought some very cheap brown envelopes and had family sit around the dining room table, each with a conveyor belt-style way of getting the favours done. I was on hole punching. My wife was on the seeds. My in-laws helped with stickers and stamping. It was great fun, and part of the joy of DIY'ing it.
The second-best DIY tip?
Borrow absolutely everything you can. Speak with the venue and see if the couple are happy to lend their chairs for another day (we did this for our wedding, and the couple were more than happy to lend them to us).
The ultimate DIY tip?
Do not get what you do not need. Write a list of "nice to have" vs "absolutely need". With a DIY wedding you have control over so much more than all-inclusive options. You are hand-selecting the suppliers and choosing whether to have an item or not. I personally hate chair covers. Do we need them? Does anyone? Centre pieces remove eye-contract between guests and make a barrier to conversation. Feel free to make them small, or not have them at all.
Point being, you're in the best position possible when you're in control of your own finances and not being swept away by someone else's idea of what a wedding needs to look like.
In this entire post I have been talking about the ways to save money, but ultimately a good DIY wedding should be about showing your partner what love looks like. Your wedding day is to show them "this: this is what love is" and build everything else from that.
"A good DIY wedding should be about showing your partner what love looks like"
Do the flowers remind you of them? Did you walk through a field of wildflowers, and want them in your bouquet? Are the tables named after the places you went on dates?
Really put "you" into DIY. And remember, in this case, "you" is plural.
Psst: some thing you should never DIY:
- Your own heart surgery
- Your own brain surgery
- Actually, any surgery on yourself.
- You knew it was coming, right? But... drumroll... wedding photography. You could theoretically get a selfie stick, or a tripod and delay the photo as you run back, or hand out disposable cameras (but ironically the entire cost of the printing of those photos will be more than the photographer and of less than half the quality)
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