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Together Forever

July 3, 2012 in
Real Weddings
Etsy.com handmade and vintage goods

Photo by Mark Tioxin of Leah and Mark

Sarah Neuburger
The Small Object

Sarah Neuburger is the one-person show behind The Small Object and Together Forever. Her wife Dawn is a critical care nurse in the ICU (and is occasionally wrangled in to help out in the shop!).

http://thesmallobject.tumblr.com/
@thesmallobject

She’s my wife! We got married!

But first, our story. We rented log cabins at Mistletoe State Park in Georgia and asked folks to come spend the weekend with us on the lake. The weekend also happened to be Cinco de Mayo, the celebration of Vesak and the Supermoon, so it was full of goodness!

Our wedding was a collective effort. Over the course of our year-long engagement, we had a few low-key crafting weekends with family and friends. We made paper tassels for our balloons, beeswax candles, Hypertufa flower pots, tablecloths, and heart pins.

Making the cake toppers was a special treat since I have been making them for other couples for several years. A friend printed our letterpress invitations and we ran up to the local copy shop to put together our wedding ceremony books.

“Whenever visitors came to town we made at least one thing together.”

For the ceremony, we wanted everyone to feel like a collective group, so we gave out gold glitter heart pins and wedding-themed temporary tattoos that we printed at home. All of our guests walked down to meet us for the ceremony, and that was our favorite moment of the day. We wrote our own ceremony and performed it ourselves, without an officiant. Our friends Erica and Lindsey played “Home” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros and “All is Love” by Karen O and the Kids afterward, because they’re that good!

“We wanted everyone to feel like a collective group.”

Our friends Amy and Pete gave us a musical serenade in lieu of a wedding toast. For our wedding dance, we asked (and were prepared to beg) a few folks to learn the dance sequence in “Anna Sun” by Walk the Moon with us, which rocked hardcore. Our friend Tracy definitely put us to shame, in the happiest of ways!

Directly after the ceremony we wanted a few quiet moments to ourselves, so we planned a canoe ride together. The fact that it was decorated and fancy, however, was a surprise my sister planned for us, and my mom jumped in to help finish it the night before.

“We wanted a few quiet moments to ourselves, so we planned a canoe ride together.”

In fact, when we came down from our cabin to see what they were doing, we found my mother and aunt standing in the lake, pants rolled up with mops in hand, cleaning the canoe; they wanted to make sure our clothes didn’t get dirty after the wedding. That image still makes me laugh; it’s so perfectly them. I even saw my father washing all of the life vests in the bathtub; I bet they had never been so clean. And you know what? We didn’t get dirty at all!

We made the food for our wedding, as well as homemade soda syrups and our favorite cocktails. We also made hundreds of empanadas and chicken adobo, and a friend catered burritos. There was no shortage of cookies and sweets – many of which we prepped and frozen in advance so they would be ready to bake in the days before the wedding.

“There was no shortage of cookies and sweets!”

Our celebration really couldn’t have happened without everyone pitching in. Our wedding wasn’t overly fussy, fancy or propped out, but it was an absolutely magical weekend!

All Photographs by Mark Tioxin of Leah and Mark.

Etsy.com handmade and vintage goods
Etsy.com handmade and vintage goods

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