Wedding Certificates

Garden certificate wedding vows detailI have a very limited quantity of fine art wedding or hand fasting certificates available for purchase.

Designed to become heirlooms, these certificate prints are reproduced from my own hand lettering and miniature paintings with the finest materials available. Museum-quality digital printing with lightfast pigment inks on heavy white 100% cotton rag hot press watercolor paper will be easy for an experienced calligrapher to fill in and for your guests to sign.

I am not making these wedding remembrance art pieces anymore, so once they are gone, they are gone. I can not print any to order, and I can not do the calligraphy for them. I might be able to help you find someone to do that, depending on your time frame and budget.

Please contact me for prices and availability if you would like or order one of these to commemorate your wedding or give one as a gift to a loved one who is marrying.

I have a small number of the Garden wedding certificate, with preprinted vows or blank for your custom vows, in very limited quantities in four sizes:
22 x 30 inches
17 x 22 inches
16 x 20 inches
13 x 19 inches

I have only two of the Elements wedding certificate in the smallest size, 13 x 19 inches, one with vows and one blank.

Detail images below, and more details below those. Click thumbnails for larger images.

 

Garden Certificate
The Garden certificate speaks the language of flowers with images of the most lovely and romantic blossoms in the painted border. Medieval folk began the practice of ascribing symbolic meanings to certain flowers, and the Victorians developed it into the “Language of Flowers.” Lovers were able to communicate secretly using this botanical “language” and thus flowers, aside from their lovely fragrances and beautiful looks, held meanings both magical and eloquent.

The flowers and their meanings, moving counterclockwise around the border:

Honeysuckle: devotion, the ties of love
Rose, pink: perfect happiness
Lilac: first emotions of love
Forget-me-not: memories
Rose, red: love, beauty, passion
Violet: faithfulness, you occupy my thoughts
Ivy: wedded love, fidelity
Pomegranate tree: plenty and prosperity, fecundity of nature, immortality
Lavender: acknowledgement of love
… and don’t forget the bluebird of happiness, and the miniature red heart hiding in the pomegranate tree!

Elements Certificate
The Elements certificate artwork shows the four elements, a robin for air, a sun for fire, a creek for water, and anchoring the design a tree, representing earth. Around the border twine oak and ivy leaves, highlighted with light yellow roses. The names of the elements are written in script around the images.

Artist note:
In my years making these commemorative pieces, both original art and these blank prints, one of the most frequent requests I had was for help in what to put for the vows. I wrote these vows when I had been married about twenty years. Now that I have been wed for a bit more than forty years, I can attest that these vows have stood the test of time. I’m happy to share them here with you.

The preprinted vows read:

In the presence of this community
[on this date]

[Name] and [Name]
join our lives together.

We promise to love one another,
to cherish, honor and respect each other, to trust in the seasons
of life’s joys and sorrows, to create a loving home together
from this day forward.
[signature] [signature]

Witnesses
[signatures]