Sarto wedding venue toasts to good fortune

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/10/2014 (3474 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Carla Ibarra remembers something her mother said, perhaps on a whim, when she got married in 2006.

Only a year earlier, her parents had bought a new place east of Sarto and prepared their new yard to host the outdoor wedding their daughter wanted.

What her mother proposed was that she would start a wedding venue here.

The suggestion never got past the idea phrase, and it’s not something that seriously crossed her daughter’s mind either.

After tying the knot with a man she met in Mexico, Carla (nee Schellenberg) and Diego moved from Winnipeg to Mexico and then to B.C. That was six years of their marriage.

But feeling alone on the West Coast, they decided to return to the Prairies.

That wedding venue idea again began to percolate. This time, with help from her sister. 

“It was still burning in me,” she said. “Usually, I have a lot of ideas but I don’t follow through.”

In spring 2013, Ibarra was nudged to move ahead when she found out a nearby wedding venue was already booked for the summer. She got working quickly.

Ibarra guessed she’d get as many as 10 bookings in 2014, her first full year in operation.

Instead, she hosted more than 50 weddings.

“I did not expect an overwhelmingly positive response from people. You do something that you envision and you think that you like it, but you don’t realize how many other people really appreciate it,” she said of her outdoor venue, Cielo’s Garden.

More on the family’s story in the Oct. 16 edition of The Carillon.