I wanted to share an unexpectedly complicated DIY that I just completed - our marriage certificate!
marriage certificate
We got our marriage license last month, but we are getting married at the courthouse and we didn't like the generic marriage certificate they gave us just as a courtesy. In Illinois you are not required to have witnesses, but we wanted to have roles for our siblings, so I decided to design a marriage certificate for us and two of our brothers to sign. It took waaaaay longer than I thought it would! I couldn't find templates or examples I liked, and the wording I found in most places was just as blah or problematic (super god-heavy, which is not our thing) as what we had been handed at the county clerk's office. I also wasn't into a lot of the graphics I was finding.
I know it looks pretty simple, but I'm excited about the graphics. I took a snip from a Mapbox Light of the area where we are being married, and where I grew up, on the Mississippi River. I messed with the colors until you could only see the river, then duplicated and rotated it for each of the four corners (the bottom right corner is what the River actually looks like in the area where we're getting married - it's the only part of the Mississippi that runs east-west). The river is important to both of us for different reasons, and I was happy to be able to incorporate it somewhere!
I used the two fonts that we have used for everything (save the dates, invitations, printed signs for the reception, etc.). I also changed what I kept seeing in the passive voice ("were united", "were joined") and went with "committed" - feels more appropriate to me. I used the term "covenant" because we recently joined a Unitarian Universalist church, and that is the language they use and I like its implications.
Anyway, it seems like a simple thing, but it's a relief to be done and I'm excited to have it! I also had trouble finding examples, so I wanted to share it somewhere.
