Wedding Anniversary

My Husband and I spent our 3 year anniversary in New York City this year. It was a lovely and romantic time. Here are a few photos from our trip. 

Beautiful flowers in the French Garden in Central Park.

We drank ALL the wine(s).

View from Asiate, the restaurant where we celebrated our anniversary.

English Garden pond.

Central Park

30 Rockefeller Plaza

Halloween 2012

Hellooooo!

I went on a little photography adventure and took pictures of houses decorated for Halloween.
Halloween is my favorite holiday. I love the idea of having a day to celebrate all things spooky and autumnal. I love walking around at night in the fall, taking in the smells of crisp leaves and fires lit in surrounding houses.

I hope you all had a fun Halloween and are enjoying this season.

Floral Design

It's spring and wedding season is in full effect. I have been to six weddings this season and I am about done with it all! But really, it has been a happy time. I have worked weddings before as a wedding photographer/videographer but with these most recent weddings I have taken on a few new roles. This spring I have been an attendee, a bartender/server, and a floral designer.

I wanted to write about my experience making bridal bouquets for my sister-in-law Samantha's wedding.

Sam's wedding took place in Bahamas on an island called Exuma. I was honored with the task and surprised that my family had so much faith in my very little experience floral arranging.  I had done the decorating and flowers for Sam's bridal shower and I suppose that was enough to prove myself worthy. Here is how it all went down.

Sam flew in some white and green hydrangea for the bridesmaid's bouquets and some green orchids for her bouquet. The plan was to use those flowers as a base and then go pick the rest from the wilds of Exuma. Exuma has amazingly colorful foliage so I knew I could make something great. I went out with the groom's cousin and picked a ton of flowers! We picked a wonderfully colorful paper thin flower called Bougainvillea which comes in bright fushia, pale peach and pink. Then we found a Frangipani bush and picked a few handfuls. These flowers have five white petals that turn yellow in the middle. They smell beautiful and are usually used in Hawaiian lays, which is fitting since half of Sam's family is from Hawaii. Then we picked a few Ixora, which are clusters of small yellow and orange flowers. Lastly we snipped some fern steams and a few green berry like plants for filler and off we went with a trunk full of flowers.

With all the flowers loaded into a bedroom at the reception house I went to work, sweating and stressing out the whole way though. It took me about three hours since this was my first time making bouquets. I wanted the bouquets to be perfect, no flower out of place or sticking out in a weird way since all most of the steams were bent at strange angles. I personalized each bridesmaid's bouquet so that they were a little different and saved all of the best flowers for the bride's bouquet. After wrapping the stems in ribbon and attaching two small lacquered ivory flowers to the bride's bouquet ( gifted from her grandmother, she wore them in her vail when she got married) I ran the flowers down to to the bridal party twenty minutes before the ceremony.
Phew!
It was a challenge for me, but the bridal party and the bride were pleased which made me happy.

The ceremony took place on the beach and was very lovely.

Here are a few photographs of the making of the bouquets and the finished product.

Cats with Katie and Anna Podcast!

At the end of 2011 my friend Anna and I started our first podcast called "Cats with Katie and Anna".

If you are unfamiliar with podcasts, it is like a radio show that you can download to your computer/ipod and listen to any time you like.... for free!

I love podcasts for this reason.

I have been listening to podcasts for the last four years and it has been great for driving around in the car. Instead of having to listen to obnoxious morning shows, I can listen to a podcast by a favorite comedian or listen to a show about science or books or whatever you might be interested in. So I am really happy to co-host a show with a friend, it really was a bright spot in 2011 for me.

Anyway, enough of my babbling. The show is about..... cats! Ha.
It is like NPR's "The Splendid Table" but about cats and not so much about food, even though food might come up, because, it's like, the best thing in the world.

On our first show we talked about our cats, christmas trees, cat gifts, dreamcurls, "tuggin", cat piano, cat socks, and making donation's to your local animal shelter for the holidays.

We plan on having guests on eventually and I think that will be a lot of fun!

So if you like cats or know anyone who likes cats pass on the word and give a listen to

Cats with Katie and Anna!

Here is a link to our podbean site were you can stream it to your computer.

http://www.catswithkatieandanna.podbean.com/

Also join our facebook page and post pictures of your cat!

Cats with Katie and Anna on Facebook!

I think Martha would approve!

Francis Whitmore's Wife

This is a video that was made of my artist friend, Kathy Fahey's crankie. Kathy was kind enough to ask me to do some cut out paper puppeteering for the video.

I think this medium of the "crankie" for story telling is beautiful, whimsical and enamoring. Kathy does a beautiful job constructing this crankie, and singing as well.

Please check it out!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYrNBbVqQGE&feature=youtu.be

This is a scrolling shadow puppet show or "crankie" based on a song by Carole Moody Crompton. The songwriter set the song to the tune of an old shape note song called Fiducia. It is the true story of one of the first families to settle in southern Vermont in the mid 18th century.

Video Credits:
Vocals: Katherine Fahey
Songwriter: Carole Moody Crompton
Director of Photography: Michael Patrick O'Leary
Art Director/Paper cutter/puppeteer: Katherine Fahey
Puppeteer: Katie Cuffari Shinsato
Puppeteer: Rebecca Siegmund Williams
Paper Cutter: Raj Bunnag
Sound: Nick Sjostrom
Crank Box Construction: Neal Golden

Happy 2012!

Well it has been awhile!

2011 has been a crazy year!

I quit my restaurant job earlier in the year and just have been winging it ever since. There have been some highs and some lows. I have gone months with out a job, and then other months I have been pretty busy. As much as I like freelancing, a full time job is the goal eventually. I still struggle with what I want to do in life. I feel just as clueless as I did 10 years ago. But I keep going, keep trying new things and meeting new people. I have to accept that I will never be a type A personality. I will always not want to wake up early, I will keep being a procrastinator, it will always be hard for me to motivate myself to work hard on my own. But despite these character flaws (laziness), I know that once I find a job, once I find something to do, I make sure I do it the best I can. But whatever.

There have been a few things going on, a few extra circular activities that I am excited to share.

This past November my friend Katie and I co-curated a photography show. Here is the blurb about the project.

"Baltimore: Place to Place "

''This collaborative project brings Baltimore residents together to look at both iconic and hidden treasures this unique city has to offer and photographing them from an individual perspective. Participants were asked to choose a location in Baltimore, which in turn was swapped out with another location at random. After photographing the location and choosing one image, those involved were asked to write about their experience. This led to a deeper look into what the location meant to them, whether they had been there before or were seeing a part of Baltimore for the first time.

This project was created by Katie Smallwood and Katie Shinsato, two long time Baltimore residents looking to celebrate the city they experience every day while hoping to gain new perspectives along the way. By collaborating with Baltimore photographers, both professional and new to the art, the possible outcomes were endless and shed newlight on what makes Charm City so special.''

The event was held at "The WindUp Space" and had a great turn out. It felt good to step outside my comfort zone and do something I had no experience in. Katie and I came up with the concept, wrangled people to participate, set deadlines, found a venue, individually picked up the photographs, hung them with the art director from the venue and had an opening. All of that took us many months since we had no idea what we were doing. But now we know and hope it will be a much smoother process next time.

It was great to meet new people and have professional and amateur photographers come together in one show to celebrate Baltimore.

Here are a few photos of Katie and I and participants reading what they wrote about their experience photographing their place.

Thank you to all who participated and to The WindUp Space for hosting the show.

Also, we were fortunate enough to have an article written about the project. A special thanks to Baynard Woods for the article and to The Urbanite Online.

Here is the link to the article:

http://www.urbanitebaltimore.com/baltimore/the-purpose-of-place/Content?oid=1464847

Autumn Times

Thankfully, it has been a busy autumn for me. Got a few things going on that I will make a post about, but just wanted to make a short post with a few pictures.

I had a quiet Halloween. It was my first time at home on Halloween and I so much wanted some trick or treaters to stop by. But alas, after sitting outside my house adorned in a renaissance festival cloak and witch hat, I only had one kid from the neighborhood come to trick or treat. A girl dressed as Hermione Granger came up to my porch, only after I called out to her like a creep. At least I got a Harry Potter character. I don't mean to complain though, I had a nice night sitting on the porch for an hour and a half watching the sun go down. My cat Koji kept me company by sitting in the window.