Are there any diy brides !!!!!! Share your experience

Our wedding was Harry Potter themed and we did a few DIY items.

- The wands were DIY and it spanned over a few months that we made 120 of them. Small little dowel rods, hot glue, spray paint, etc. It was a bit of a nightmare towards the end because of everything that had gone on in personal life (we got backed up with making them) and my MIL ended up buying some off etsy because she didn't like how some of them turned out. Kind of broke my heart, because I liked them all. It wasn't... something I got too hung up on, because I force myself to push through and think that there were more important things.

- We were going to do rememberall ornaments as favors. Our wedding was Oct 5th and we thought it'd be a 'cute' reminder of the wedding when Xmas rolled around in 2 months and it kinda played on the 'rememberall' thing. I bought everything in January after Christmas (so, all on good sale) and we started to fill them with red yarn and stuff because it changes red when you forget something. I posted on another wedding website and people basically called it a stupid idea and it disheartened me, so I stopped doing it... and I have 50 plastic ornaments filled with red yarn somewhere. Kinda disappointing.

- We originally bought an archway from Hobby Lobby. BIGGEST. MISTAKE. EVER. It was a piece of crap. Bad. Like -- super bad. My Husband actually took the time to 'disassemble' the crap one and make a whole other one out of wood and vinyl lattice. We had already bought flowers and vines to put on the one we bought, so it's not like we paid extra for the decoration parts... I honestly think the DIY turned out better than the one we bought. It was a headache, though -- still.

There might have been more, but since the wedding is over with... I've forgotten? It's... weird. Kinda like my brain is saying: "You don't have to stress/remember, anymore!". I know that my wedding was fun and enjoyable, people liked their wands and I heard compliments on our archway.

I can definitely say DIY is a lot more stressful than outright buying, when it becomes crunch time. Sometimes it can be cheaper, sometimes more expensive. Just depends. As long as you get it done a good amount of time before the wedding, you're good. That's one thing that we didn't expect as we had about a year to get it all together, but life happened.

Those look awesome

I'm DIYing everything for our wedding (except clothes, rings). In order to keep everything straight I bought a binder and have sections for everything. I have a rolling calendar that shows what projects need to be completed at what times. My work schedule is hectic so I didn't want to end up with 400 things to do a month before the wedding. I've got supply lists and where I'm ordering what supplies from all on spreadsheets. I'm a little OCD. lol It doesn't always end up cheaper but shopping off season for items, looking for sales, shop around....the internet is your friend. I've found a lot of places I wouldn't have even considered looking for my wedding stuff.

Thank you! Congrats to you as well! And your card box looks wonderful!

I almost did the picture frame idea as my card box! All those YouTube videos for it but it just didn't fit the overall look I wanted so I went with a different look. I pretty much DIY'd every decor aspect of our wedding. The centerpieces, photo booth (backdrop and props, photo booth frame, donut towers, s'mores bar, dessert table, all the signs (welcome, unplugged, memorial etc), seating tags, card box, favors which were mini newspapers. I am very crafty so it was relaxing to me to slowly work on everything, my hubby helped so it gave us some bonding time and it also kept me from having to stress on waiting for someone else to do it, it not coming out how I wanted etc. Google, Hobby Lobby and Dollar Tree were my best friends for many months lol.