When pooling creative ideas together for your DIY wedding, it helps to eliminate the expenses and items you know you don’t want to include — or that you perhaps cannot afford — so you can instead focus on what you do want.
We have rounded up five DIY wedding traditions you’ll want to skip in a DIY wedding to avoid the hassle and devote your creative energy to what’s important.
1. Generic Thank You Cards
Generic thank you cards should be a thing of the past. Instead, the best way to thank your guests for attending your wedding is to send them personalized thank you cards. Select a photo of each guest or family member and have it serve as the cover of your thank you card. On the back, it can say “thanks for attending the wedding” and mention the gift they got you.
2. Photo Booths
Renting a photo booth for your wedding may seem like a cute, retro idea, but the truth is it’s not worth the price tag if you’re already paying for a professional photographer. Plus, wedding photographers can snap plenty of silly pictures and capture even the wildest moments at a wedding reception. Though photo booths are fun, they don’t have the same effect when you’re already paying for a wedding photographer.
3. Designated Seating Arrangements
Creating seating arrangements for your guests is a great idea for the wedding ceremony, but you might want to skip it for the reception. Families and groups will tend to sit together anyway, so there isn’t much point in making name cards for each spot at the reception tables. Social mingling will happen naturally, and guests tend to open up more easily with more freedom and less pressure.
4. Wedding Favors
Wedding favor trinkets like bubbles, handmade crafts, desserts and cocktail kits don’t leave your guests with lasting memories. Despite how cute they are, many couples are opting out of sending guests home with these items in favor of donating to a charity on behalf of every guest or sending each party a photo book of the wedding after the wedding.
5. A Traditional Wedding Gown
The long, elaborate wedding dress is beautiful, but many DIY-ers are skipping it because it’s not practical. One option is to have a convertible dress that has a long gown you can attach for pictures and the actual ceremony. That way, when you need to use the bathroom, sit down to eat or when it’s time to enjoy your wedding reception, you don’t have a bulky dress to deal with. Alternatively, you can skip the traditional look altogether if it’s not important to you and instead go with a wedding dress that’s ankle-length or shorter.
Planning Your Best DIY Wedding
DIY-ing your wedding is the best way to create something more personal and memorable since it all comes from you. Considering you’re doing so much of the work, however, you don’t want to waste time on conventional gestures that don’t actually matter to you — and probably not to your guests, either. Forget tradition for just the sake of it and do away with what doesn’t make sense on which to spend your creative resources.
2018 ·