Love Padlocks
I have seen a lot more going around lately about love padlocks, so I thought I would share our version :)
When we were planning our wedding, we wanted to find something symbolic to show our joining, but we didn’t want to do the usual unity candle or sand. We searched a lot of places for an alternative and ended up finding the love padlock. The idea is to lock the padlock with your names and (usually) your wedding date on a bridge and throw the key into the water below. Google “love padlock” and look at the images and you’ll see just how big this is, especially in Europe.
Being in land locked Colorado and with our wedding venue nowhere near any body of water, we wanted to find another way to do the love padlock besides a bridge. And so what you see here was born. We brain stormed all kinds of things we could lock together and settled on horse shoes. Fitting because 1) horses are a part of my life but more importantly 2) The horseshoe is a symbol of luck in Ireland and brides wear a horseshoe to give them luck in love for life!
A friend of ours welds (joescustom.com), so we bought 2 horseshoes and he shaped them into two halves of a heart, cut holes, and hinged the bottom of the heart together. We bought a lock and had it engraved with our names and wedding date!
During our ceremony, we locked the heart together. The keys were given to our mothers, with the statement “Growing up, Emily and Erik’s mothers gave them the keys to open the padlock and their hearts. Now that their hearts have found each other and are joined, they return the keys to their mothers, reminding them that we could not be here today without them”. So our mothers have the key in their own little shadow box at home, and our love padlock is in our home in a shadow box as well. I still want to spruce up the shadow box to make it better, but you get the idea!
PS: Thanks to Harper Point Photography for the ceremony pictures!!