Sean and Katie Jacobs-Frye sealed their vows in a quaint barn in upstate New York this weekend. But it wasn’t until receiving the invoice for the silkscreened burlap drink cozies that Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs realized the wedding has left them over $50,000 in debt.
“When Katie told me she wanted to have her big day on a mule ranch, I was surprised,” mother Linda Jacobs recalls. “I thought she was trying to be thrifty, but when I saw the bill for the decorative antique wartime wheelbarrows, I knew something was wrong.”
Katie strove to make her barn wedding as “DIY-looking” as possible. Guests were welcomed with a hand-engraved Mason jar cocktail, while they sat on thorny haystacks to enjoy the rustic folk trio imported from Brooklyn. Katie walked down the aisle in a $5,000 designer dress sewn from reclaimed burlap and was followed by her bridesmaids: five goats in farm girl dresses.
Attendees commented that the whole celebration was “charmingly authentic.” One guest recalls that she actually stepped in horse manure, “which I think was part of the ambiance.”
The Jacobs family will be forced to put off retirement another few years to pay the debt, but remain optimistic: “At least we have the sepia-toned lithographs to remember the good times.”
