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The Offbeat Bride: Cristina, Funeral Director

Her offbeat partner: Adrian, Property Manager

Date and location of wedding: World Forestry Center (Cheatham Hall) in Portland, Oregon — September 22, 2012

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Our offbeat wedding at a glance: We had a lot of craft nights in preparation for the wedding. We have amazing friends that came over on many occasions to help put wedding decorations together. My maid of honor and I were still working away on duct tape flowers early into the morning of the wedding.

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It was super important to me to have an all-vegan wedding. We found a caterer that did an amazing job at putting together a great vegan menu and we didn't advertise the fact that it was vegan until after dinner. People had only great things to say about the food and it seemed we did a good job of convincing the skeptics that vegan doesn't have to equal weird. We also ensured that the hand soap in the bathroom was vegan and that no one in our wedding party wore any silk, leather, wool, etc.

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I tried on some white wedding dresses, but I knew that white wasn't right for me. Finally, I went into a dress shop in the mall and found the perfect pink and purple dress. It's like it was made for me!

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Our dog was our ring bearer. It meant so much to us to have her in the wedding. She did such a good job and got a lot of “awws.”

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My friend Jenny volunteered to belly-dance at the wedding. We didn't really tell people about it so that it would be kind of a surprise. It was a hit and we are so grateful to Jenny for such an awesome wedding present!

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We thought it would be a good idea to have some random toys at each table for our guests to play with. Adrian knew it would be fun all along, but I was a little worried that people wouldn't play with them. Man, was I wrong. Adrian was right — people loved them and we got so many great pictures and video of people playing with toys.

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We used WeddingMix by StoryMix instead of a videographer to do our wedding filming. What you do is select a package, they send you a number of Flip cameras depending on which package you selected and also give you a code for an iPhone app. Those people that download the app can then be part of the process! Throughout the night, people filmed various scenes and they all got uploaded onto Storymix's website at which time we went in and selected which clips we wanted in the video. After that, they edit the video and voila, a wedding video for a lot cheaper than if you hired someone to film. It was so fun seeing what people came up with. It's like leaving disposable cameras around for pictures, but better!

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Tell us about the ceremony: Because of the shape of our venue, we decided to come in through different side doors and meet in the middle instead of walking down the aisle.

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Our wedding party walked in to “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and we walked in to “All I Want Is You” by Barry Louis Polisar.

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We wrote our own vows and Adrian also read a Romanian translation of “You Are My Sunshine.” When our officiant asked for the rings, Adrian's nephew walked our dog Juniper down the aisle so that we could unhook the rings from her doggie dress.

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As we placed rings on each other's fingers, we also held pinkies so as to pinky swear that we were committing to each other.

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For our unity ceremony, we used an idea we saw on Offbeat Bride. We decided to do a chemistry experiment where we had baking soda and vinegar in two separate graduated cylinders that we then poured into an Erlenmeyer flask that also had vinegar in it. The idea was that it was supposed to have bubbled up and caused a reaction, but unfortunately it had been sitting out for so long that it didn't quite work out like we expected. We had to laugh it off and move on.

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My favorite moment: We were so overwhelmed with the number of people that showed up. We live in a state where same sex marriage is not legal, so we were a little afraid that people would not treat our wedding as a real wedding. However, that was totally not the case. We sensed no discrimination from any of the vendors we talked to and no one batted an eye when we invited them to our wedding.

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Because we were not getting legally married, we were able to have a little bit of flexibility with the ceremony. Our friend Sanjay who officiated our wedding, was able to put together an amazing ceremony without having to consider the boundaries of being an ordained minister.

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I'm Romanian and as a completely unexpected surprise, Adrian had my cousins help her translate the words to “You Are My Sunshine” in Romanian. This just made my heart melt. She often sings it for me in English and it has become meaningful to us so for her to translate and read it during the ceremony was just so thoughtful.

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My funniest moment: All the toasts our friends and family gave were great. They were meaningful but also had a lot of humor.

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My advice for Offbeat Brides: You go into planning really excited about doing something different and not following unnecessary tradition, but somewhere along the way you do get a little worried that maybe you should have stuck to some of the normal wedding things. Just ignore that feeling because if you do it your way, you and your guests will appreciate it. People may be confused at first but then they seem to have an “aha” moment when they realize it makes sense because they know you and this is who you are.

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Make sure you can walk in your shoes. I found the most amazing shoes that I was so sure I would learn how to walk in. Cut to the night before the wedding where I am freaking out that I have no clue how to walk in such tall heels. My maid of honor and I had to rush from store to store looking for back up shoes. I found some cute ones but I had to hold up my dress all night because it was not meant for heels that small.

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Care to share a few vendor/shopping links?

Enough talk — show me the wedding inspo!


film: Storymix Media
decor: Luna Bazaar

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Comments on Cristina & Adrian’s colorful, lesbian, vegan night of fun

  1. Congratulations and good pointer about the shoes! Also wanted to add that the irony of not being able to get legally wed actually gives you more flexibility.

  2. Wow Cristina & Adrian are so awesome and so darn cute/bad-ass!!! I love the colors and the puppy outfit! We’re planning on having our border collie in our wedding with a flower collar.. but yea, I just love every thing about this wedding and reception from the pictures! Great pics! <3

  3. Empire Records?
    EMPIRE RECORDS??

    Oh my goodness I love you both now! The wedding looked like so much fun and you’d solidified the idea that I need to put those toys on the tables!

    Just gorgeous!

  4. What a nice wedding and you’re both so haut!

    Love the crazy colours and your bridal dress is amazing.

    Hope you don’t mind, could you provide me with a link of where you learned to make those duct tape flowers?

    Thanks,

    Sid

    • You can find how to make duct tape flowers on youtube.com and there is tons of ideas of other duct tape projects to make there. I haven’t made a flower yet but want to try though… hope this helps you!

    • I’m sure that it is all over You Tube, but I actually got my tutorial off of the Duck Brand Duct Tape website. They have all kinds of fun crafts on there. If you do this, I would recommend definitely using Duck Brand because it is far stickier than other brands. Everything else seemed to fall apart. Sorry this response is about a month late!

  5. Beautiful! And that is one of my favourite colour combos. You both look absolutely gorgeous. I’m glad you had such a fabulous and meaningful celebration.

  6. So much FABULOUS! I love it all! As it turns out, I’m particularly obsessed with Adrian’s vest. Where did you get it?

    • Hi Sunny,

      So sorry for the delayed response, Cristina and I just found out that we were on this website today.
      Thank you for the kind words, I got my vest off of ebay surprisingly enough! I just typed into the search lace backed vest and it came up. If you can’t find one that you love let me know, I don’t have any need for my vest now so I could give it to you 🙂

  7. The colors and the vegan food were my favorite parts of this (and such pretty peeps getting married of course ^^ I loved both outfits!)

    The chemical reaction idea is cool, but I’ll remember not to leave them out, that’s one of the little things that no one thinks about I guess….

  8. That dress is truly amazing. I wish I could pull something like that off.

    Congrats to you both! Looks like quite an awesome day. 🙂

  9. Thank you all so much for your nice words! I promise you that Cristina and I aren’t rude people due to the delayed response we never got notified that we made it on the website so we literally just found this today!

    • Adrian, did you not receive the email notification? Our editors always try to email a few days before a wedding profile goes up!

      • Hey Ariel,

        I’m the one who submitted it and I’ve been looking out for an email but never found one in my inbox. I looked at our photo set yesterday and noticed a ton of views so I thought that just in case, I would check Offbeat Bride and sure enough, there we were! Oh well, we found it. We are so excited to have our wedding on here. Thanks so much to you and your team!

        • Could you check your spam folder? I’m totally stumped by this!

          • Unfortunately, it only goes back to December 3 and there was nothing from that day until the 5th when it was published. If it was sent before that and went to spam I can’t tell.

  10. WOW!!! Adrian and Christina, your wedding was wonderful, it looked so much fun, so innovative, playful, and colorful, but at the same time serious, sincere and loving!! Thanks for sharing with me!!

    Cheri Buckmaster

    • Thank you for going on there and looking. And for your kind words. 🙂

  11. What a lovely wedding, and so colorful! Where on EARTH did you get your glovelets, Cristina? My roomie is a cosplay costumer and would die several deaths for them.

  12. HOLY MOLY! What a gorgeous wedding! Love the colors, love the use of vegan food, and the toy idea is fantastic! 🙂 Both of you are stunning and congrats 🙂

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