What NOT to DIY for your wedding

Toying with the idea of hosting a DIY wedding? While it’s a great idea to tap into your creativity, DIYing certain elements can be more effort and cost than its worth. Here’s what NOT to DIY for your wedding.

Invitations

Unless you’re proficient at graphic design, creating your own wedding invitations might be more effort than they’re worth. While it might be easy to get one invitation looking absolutely perfect, imagine having to do the same 100 times over. This entire process may take away valuable time you could be using on other things. And, when you add up the eventual costs of materials, you might end up spending the same amount making your own invitations as you would buying them from a professional wedding invitation vendor.

Dress

Unless you’re a seamstress or a tailor, it’s probably best to leave your wedding dress to the experts. If you’re used to sewing and altering your own clothes, you might be more inclined to give your dress a go yourself, but your wedding dress is something extremely important, and has no room for slip ups or mistakes. Plus, creating your dress from scratch will be extremely time consuming, and may burn you out before you get really stuck into other elements of your wedding day.

Additionally, the materials purchased to produce your dream dress may end up costing you a similar amount to what a custom dress designer would charge, and at least with a professional you’re safeguarded against mistakes or malfunctions through a signed contract.

Photography

In a day and age where every person and their dog owns a camera and hails themselves a ‘photographer’, it can be tempting to ask one of your family members to take your wedding photography. The issue with this is, your family and friends are invited to your wedding to participate – not observe. Giving a family member or a friend such responsibility can go one of two ways: they can take it too seriously and not join in on the celebrations at all, or they can knock off early and miss all the important moments while they get a drink at the bar.

Also, professional photographers are trained in what they do. They know what lighting to use, how to get you and your guests to pose, and how to keep everyone happy amid tiresome and sometimes boring photoshoots. Your family member or friend (usually) won’t have these skills, and it will show in the final product at the end of the day.

Makeup

There are definitely some benefits to doing your own wedding makeup. For one, you’ll look exactly like you always do. You won’t feel like somebody else under all those layers of foundation, powder, and fake eyelashes. But where’s the fun in that?

The time spent in your hotel room with your bridesmaids getting ready is a time you’ll cherish to years to come! You primp and prime yourself every day – why not allow a professional to do it on the most important day of your life?

Makeup artists are equipped with the skills to create the perfect bridal look. They know what make up looks good in certain lights, and what looks best in wedding photography. Trust them – they know what they’re doing!

Doing your makeup yourself might save you a quick buck, but is it really worth it when your wedding photography (that you paid for) comes back underwhelming, and you look under the weather?

Flowers

It can be tempting to pick flowers from your own garden and create your own bouquet, but there’s more to the floristry service that goes beyond that. Florists know what flowers and colours work together, how long a particular flower will last during the day before wilting, and which seasons are best for which flowers.

It might be worth putting more money into a perfect florist-maid bouquet that will last the entire day, than be left with a sad, wilting mess by mid afternoon.

DJ

Yes, everyone has access to Spotify and an iPod, but that doesn’t mean everyone is a wedding DJ. Wedding DJ’s do so much more than just ‘press play’ – they choose songs that’ll ramp up the dancing, songs that’ll suit as background music for when everyone’s eating, and will judge the atmosphere and general demographic for whether or not to play a certain song. If you’re at all worried that nobody will dance, they certainly won’t if your iPod just picks your top 40 hits at random, and plays that incredibly embarrassing hymn you accidentally downloaded a few years ago.

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