My wife (or I guess she was still my fiance at the time) asked me to make the alter for our wedding. Or maybe it's called an arch, or arbor. Whatever it's called, its the big tall thing you stand under at your wedding ceremony.

We were going with an art deco, art nueve, "great gatsbe" sorta theme for the wedding and I wanted something that would compliment that.

I already had a large piece of 2' x 8' x 1" edge-glued spruce board from Menards (was like $40) in the garage, but you could very well do the same with 1/2" plywood. I figured it would be the perfect piece for this project because I could cut an arch shape into it.

I drew up several designs on graphing paper and Logan and I chose our favorite one.

Each square on the graphing paper represented 3" at full scale. So 24x8 squares was 6ft x 2ft which was the size of my board. The numbers and letters helps tremendously to map it out on the board.

I then made the same grid on the board and added the numbers and letters.

Then I could copy the design onto the grid.

I bought a new jig saw and started cutting away!

Then I used my favorite stain, Watco danish oil in their Black Walnut color. It looks really good on spruce, and even manages to make white pine look good.

I added some final touches with some gold paint and stincels from Hobby Lobby. To be honest, I wished I skipped this step. It came out a little sloppy, and the altar didn't really need it anyways.

Onto the posts. They are 8 foot long hemlock 4x4s. My friend with a large table saw (I have a small cheap one but it would have been too sketchy) helped me cut some mortise and tenon joints. The pieces with the mortises in them were later screwed to the back of the top board. The mortise and tenon joints were chosen because they were strong and beefy but mainly because the whole thing could be broken down into three pieces, moved in the back of my SUV to the venue, and then reassembled again with out any tools at all (a latter helped though).

I then screwed some 3ft long 4x4 hemlock onto the bottom of them to hold it all upright. I used these huge 6" screws, two in each post.

And I used these cool cast iron shelf brackets to add some more decoration. They were also found at Hobby Lobby for less than $20 each I think.

And it was ready for a test drive!

On the big day, the mothers and aunts helped with the decorations and they did a great job with my arbor.

It worked great but I will admit that it was a little flimsy when being moved around. That was because there was no cross braces, which it would definitely need if it had to do anything other than sit there and hold up 1 ounce of silk garland.

There was one other problem though: Logan's dress got caught on it!! A rogue strand got hooked around one of the shelf brackets used on the post. Sorry Logan!