This week I wanted to talk a bit of some of the projects we took on for our wedding – in particular doing our own flowers and DJing our wedding with an ipod playlist. David said I should also talk about our wine, but I can tell you how to DIY your wine in two seconds: figure out some good affordable wine that you like, figure out about how much you think people will drink, buy wine. And NO, I don’t know what kind of wine you like, so don’t even ask. So *that’s* covered.
But before we talk about DIY, or my favorite made-up acronym DIT (do-it-together), I wanted to parse what we mean when we say DIY. Over the lifetime of this blog, I’ve gotten a lot of emails saying something along the lines of, “Oh my god! You’re wedding is so DIY! I could never do that…” which always left me with a bit of a feeling of, “Whhhhaaaaa???” Because here is the thing: I’ve never considered myself to be terrifically DIY. I have something of a creative personality, but I’m not crafty. To me a DIY wedding conjures up images of hand made bunting flags, handmade glassine envelopes with homemade confetti, and handmade stickers to affix on handmade favors. And for better or worse, our wedding had none of those things.
Here is the thing. I’m a hippie kid. Long story short, I grew up without any sort of TV or VCR, and never missed it. People used to ask us, “But what do you DO?” and our response was always, “But when do you have TIME for TV?” As for what we did: we read a lot, and we made stuff. My mom sewed all my clothes when I was little, both my sister and I started sewing when we could reach the machine, my mom spun wool, my sister knit chain mail, I collaged and danced, my dad cooked. But none of us would consider ourselves crafty. In fact, we were not necessary even *good* at the stuff we did, we just grew up with the idea, “Need something? Can you make it? Cool. If you can’t make it, can you afford to buy it?”
So that’s how I approached our wedding. I knew I didn’t need any *additional* trouble. I figured I was going to have plenty of trouble as it was. So I never took on extra craft projects. But if we needed something, without thinking about it, we’d approach the problem as, “Hum. Can we do this ourselves, or do we need to hire someone?” In the case of DJing, it never occurred to us to hire someone, because with current technology it was so easy to to ourselves. With the flowers, I knew that I wanted more flowers than I could afford to get from a florist, and flower arranging sounded fun, so done. And, well, making food for 120 people did *not* sound like fun to us. So we hired someone, and were thrilled to support a creative business.
So why am I telling you this? I’m telling you because I’m inviting us to reconsider the way we think of DIY. Because yes, the wedding industry will sell you every single thing you need, pre-packaged. These days they’ll even sell you someone else’s creativity pre-packaged (need someone to style your wedding, so you don’t have to flex your own style muscles? Done!) None of this is inherently bad. For those of us that work long hours, some of this is a god-send.
But what if our first question was, “Hey, can I do this thing for myself, or should I hire someone to do it?” And what if we stopped asking, “Hey, am I *talented* at this thing?” and realized that the right question to ask is, “Hey, do I *enjoy* this thing?” What if we stopped thinking of DIY as crafty-crafty-madness, and started thinking of it as simple self (and community) sufficiency?
So please think of DIY/DIT week that way. Self sufficiency. Because *that* I can get behind.
