Get ye to the village square

Mailed off my application for Bele Chere today. If you are unfamiliar with it, Bele Chere is the biggest free outdoor street festival in the Southeast. This year it falls on July 23rd-25th, with estimated attendance to be between 300,000-350,000 people. I am very excited and anxious to see if my application will be accepted. I hope to be able to not only sell my cords, but perform year and a day style handfastings at the festival. These are the photos I included with my application, hoping this was a decent representation of my designs.


For the booth during the festival, I am hoping to have flowers and vines and many more cords on display.






Get ye to the village square,
to tie the knot with lady fair.

Handfastings in the News

I recently dug up these stories about handfastings, enjoy!

(Not Quite) Out to Pasture: Knocking down walls Not really a story about handfasting but a statement on our unjust marriage laws:

I mean we’ve been a couple for almost eighteen years and the ceremony we had two summers back, a Neo-pagan hand fasting ritual, was really only something we did for ourselves. But I will never give up my opinion that everyone, regardless of sexual orientation, should be allowed to wed if they wish to.

For Heathen's Sake A love story from Maryland...with pictures:

the couple exchange vows in a 20-minute ceremony in an outdoor pavilion that combined Christian rituals -- the unity candle -- with pagan traditions, such as handfasting, an ancient practice in which the couple's wrists are bound with a rope.

Unconventional Wedding The reporter of this piece should be flogged for every bad Halloween pun:

Even conventional weddings can scare the hair off a black cat.

Bridesmaids' gowns tend toward terrifying. Anxious grooms resemble zombies.

And the parents of the bride can turn ghostly pale contemplating the tab.... on Halloween 2009, Roanoke residents ... were married in Fishburn Park in a Pagan and Wiccan handfasting ceremony.

Couple Tie Knot, See U2, Meet Bono only in Vegas...not sure why they put handfasting in quotation marks...but whatever:

...they incorporated some Celtic tradition into the ceremony, specifically "handfasting," where the bride's and groom's wrists are, literally, tied together (thus, the expression, "tying the knot").

...and then there's your standard newspaper wedding announcement I love this part:

...married on June 21, 2009, in an ancient Celtic hand fasting ceremony under a tree that resembled the tree of life...