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If you're angling to have some kind of unity ceremony at your wedding, you're probably seeing a lot about salt covenants, sand ceremonies, and unity candles, amirite? We've talked about lots of alternative unity ceremonies before, but we've got even more we wanted to collect and share with you to get your brain buzzing.
This time around, we're talking about a glow stick ceremony, a baking ceremony, a Beetlejuice sandworm ceremony, a honey ceremony, and even a lightsaber candle ceremony. Then we're going to show you a particularly awesome ceremony that gives you a super shmancy physical piece of evidence of the day to keep on display from our sponsor Unity in Glass. Let's jam about unity ceremonies, people!
Glow stick ceremony
Jodi and Kim used the magic goo inside a glow stick to make their ceremony pop with fluorescent color.
Baking ingredients ceremony
You'll want to see the ingredients that Alicia and Andrew used in their baking-themed ceremony to symbolize all the tenets of their love. Plus, it just looks delicious.
Unity tiki torches
Andrea and Patrick asked their parents to help them light UNITY TIKI TORCHES! So much kitschy radness.
Honey tasting ceremony
Liz and Onyx took turns feeding each other a nip of honey for their unifying treat. I'm digging this food trend. Remember the unity sandwich?!
Beer brewing ceremony
Speaking of nom-ables, SarahKat & Ryan used their love of beer brewing to craft up this beer-themed ceremony complete with hops.
Sand ceremony featuring a sandworm
Beth and Brian channeled their Beetlejuice love into their ceremony by including a sandworm.
Lightsaber candle ceremony
Giovanna and Jonathan got their geek on with a twist on a candle lighting ceremony by using lightsaber candles.
Colored glass ceremony that creates a permanent piece of art
While we go bananas over these unity ceremonies, one of our favorites has to be from our awesome sponsor, Unity in Glass. The biggest difference between a normal unity ceremony and Unity in Glass is that after the ceremony, you end up with one of the most beautiful sculptures ever to commemorate the day and keep on display. In a nutshell, you order colored glass crystals in your wedding colors, combine them in your own way during your unity ceremony, send them back to Unity in Glass, and they create a sculptural piece using your unique colored glass that lasts forever.
Unity in Glass can also make additional items (ornaments, paperweights, fluted bowls, infinity bowls, inventions pulled from your imagination), and create additional pieces from your remaining crystals for gifts to parents, children, or close friends. It's customizable and pants-droppingly gorgeous.
A unity ceremony with glass and 2100 degrees of heat: you're going to want to see this
What if I told you that you can take a unity ceremony to a seriously higher level by crafting up your own custom, totally unique,... Read more
Here's the scoop on how this whole process works. Spoiler: it involves 2100 degrees of HEAT. Oooh, and here's a video documenting the process and the background to how artist and owner Lee Ware got it all going:
Go take a peek at what Unity in Glass can do, and then let us know what you end up doing for your own ceremony.
About the Author: Catherine Clark
Catherine Clark loiters at her local library, makes art, watches movies en masse, plays video and tabletop games, poorly cooks healthy things, cuddles with her feline fur babies, and blogs at BijouxandBits.com.
We had a candy sand ceremony. We plan to eat the sand on our first anniversary.
I need to hear more about this! Candy sand?!? Sounds awesome!!
It was much like a sand ceremony, but edible! And with references to sticking together during the sweet and sour times. We also had plastic test tubes and extra sand that our guests could fill and take home, but it didn’t go over too well, sadly (only like 7 out of 50 got used).
Oh and by the way, candy sand doesn’t play nice with humidity. It gummed up inside our pouring vessels and took a lot of “encouragement” to pour.
Here’s a photo of me struggling to pour my sand (his fared a bit better), with the test tubes off to the right in the background. https://www.dropbox.com/s/w9igd1xinxejw0z/LIZLUI-140621-125048-CanonEOS5DMarkIIIEF35mmf-1-EX2.4LUSM-1-400secatf-3.5-262.jpg?dl=0
We had a Tea Ceremony at our mad hatters wedding. Our bridesmaids carried teapots full of “Tea” (blue for boys and pink fir girls 😉 ) and left them on a plant-urn-turned-table about halfway down our aisle. We poured the Tea into a tall vase to make purple (theme colour, kinda) Tea. Was cute and the guests thought it was sweet!
Hourglass – like a sand ceremony, but you pour the sands into an hourglass, twist the caps on, and you have a timepiece/display art.
And the glass is looking pretty enough to give that a go …
We did a rose ceremony for ours and used gold plated roses that are now sitting on display in our house.
https://allseasonsweddings.com/wedding-ceremonies-readings/rose-ceremonies
Offbeat Bride reads my mind! For the longest time I have tried to come up with an idea for our ceremony and this is it!! I am so happy I stumbled across this post!
We are big board game geeks and we used board games in our unity ceremony. One of the games we used is called “Ticket to Ride“. Link here: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9209/ticket-ride. It involves connecting different cities together and getting points. We had the version with the US map and part of the unity ceremony was to connect his hometown (Montreal, Canada) with my hometown (the closest to Richmond, VA on the map was Washington DC so we just did that) with the train game pieces. We did a similar process with two other European Style Board Games (Stone Age and Carcassone)
I so wish Unity in Glass would sell the ornaments and/or heart paperweights separately! Our wedding is long over, but I would still love to have a small piece crafted like this to celebrate an anniversary.
We had a Unity in Glass ceremony as well and I love the sculpture that came out of it! Fair warning, it was hard to find good vessels for the ceremony as there wasn’t a lot of each color of glass. We used a thin vase but still didn’t fill it up as much as we wanted. Also we didn’t practice (re-separating sand sounded messy) which led to a lot of giggles during the ceremony as we tried to figure out what we were doing. We enjoyed it though 🙂
I second Jacqueline, I wish they sold smaller pieces separately, I’d love to get another one done but can’t manage the addition of another vase or bowl at this point.
Those are all fantastic! The best I saw was at my friends’ Rachel and Chris’ wedding. They had a chunk of home-baked bread, and the officiant put sea salt on one end, that they both took a bite of, to represent the challenging times; then she put honey on the other end, that they both took a bit of, to represent the sweet times. It was such a simple, perfect metaphor for the fact that, as a basic part of life, they’ll be going through good and bad together.
As for my ceremony, I think we’d only do a unity ceremony if it could involve chocolate or coffee (two things we’re passionate about). 😀
Your unity ceremony could involve chocolate or coffee, or even both! Ours involved chocolate as well as cheese.
Wow! Love the glass beads and sculpture idea. Beautiful!