Website

     Although I love the vast beautiful world of blogging, I thought it was time to make a "real website", if you will. One that displays my entire portfolio, collections of photos for clients to view, and all my contact information.

      I've had this "real website" up and running for a few weeks and I'm pretty pleased with it. It will always the best way to view my recent/most up to date shoots, although I might come check in here every once and a while. Check it out!

Kaity Ayres | Naples Photographer


   

 

Great Gatsby

A great old friend came into town this week and I had the privilege of shooting with her.

Updates!

Here's some recent work for a little, but not actually so little, project I've been working on. I can't share too many details yet, as soon as I can though, this will be one of the first places I share! For now, just enjoy these and stay posted for updates!

Lovely Chloe

Katrina + Nick

Melanie + Little Ariana

And here's some photos from a little picnic themed photo shoot that I threw together with an amazing friend from high school and her more than precious little girl.

Red Velvet Happiness

I've been seeing this recipe all over pinterest that is supposed to make grocery store box cake taste like it came from the bakery. The only time I like box cake is when it's the funfetti kind, other than that, I think it tastes dry and just kinda blah. So, when I saw this recipe I knew I wanted to try and yesterday was the perfect day for it.

I chose to try with my favorite kind of cake, red velvet, of course. The recipe is super simple, the first thing you need to do is just look at the instructions on the back of the box like always. You still follow the same baking temperature and cooking time. The only changes you are going to make are adding and substituting a few things:

•  Add one additional egg (you can add 2 if you want it to be very rich)
• Use melted butter instead of oil and double the amount
• Use milk instead of water

And that's it, just whisk it all together and bake!

It came out to be terribly delicious, it's almost dangerous how good it turned out. The boyfriend and I loved it. I'm probably going to take a lot of it into work today so the two of us don't end up eating it all ourselves. Needless to say, I definitely recommend it.

I posted a picture of the cake all finished and iced on instagram and got a few questions about how I iced it so I'll explain real quick.  I promise it's super easy.

All you have to do is make a line from the middle of the cake to the bottom out of dollops of icing using a piping bag (Since your just basically making big "dots" out of icing a ziplock bag with the corner cut works just fine). Once you've done that, take a spoon and place the tip of the bowl in the middle of one of the dollops and with light pressure pull and drag the icing on that side. Once the you begin to see the color of the cake through the icing stop, that's where you'll place your next colum of dots. Then repeat. Looking something like this..

And here it it all finished!

Enjoy!

Creative Problem Solving

Since Alex and I moved into our new apartment in July we've had very little to complain about. Our landlord is super sweet, she's let us paint whatever colors we wanted and just has been all around really helpful and accommodating. We both are crazy in love with our new place. There's been just one teeny tiny thing that's caused us to have to do some creative problem solving. That teeny tiny (but actually not really so teeny tiny) problem, is that our walls are made of concrete. It's made hanging pictures and art extremely difficult. It also made mounting the TV in our bedroom, like we originally had planned, near impossible. The wall at the foot of our bed has two doors, one to the bathroom and one to the closet, with only four feet in between. We looked for a piece of furniture that wasn't terribly wide but tall enough so that when the TV sat on top it would be in clear view while lying in bed. Nothing we found worked and still looked the way I wanted it to. This is where the creative problem solving came into play and this is what we've ended up with..

While living in Savannah I totally fell in love with the architecture of the buildings and especially the homes. One particular thing that really stuck with me was the way the bedrooms all had fireplaces. Especially because I was born and raised in Naples, Fl the idea of a fireplace in a bedroom was totally new to me. This led me to the conclusion that a fireplace was exactly what I wanted in our room and that I had to have it, no matter how impractical. I didn't want to spend a fortune though. Which just so happens to be exactly what all fireplace mantles cost. The only solution was to turn this into a little DIY project. I did some measuring and sketching and drew up some simple plans.

Here's my barely understandable scribble of a sketch. I showed this to Alex with car keys in hand ready to head to Home Depot to get my wood cut. First, he looked at me like I was crazy. Then, being the total left-brain that he is; he took my book, sat down, and drew up this. It's probably a pretty good thing that I have him.

To make it super simple, all the mantle really consists of is three rectangular boxes and a large thicker flat piece of wood on top to make the shelf itself. This is what all the wood looked like when we got home.

After screwing all the pieces together just like a puzzle we ended up with this..

We used pieces of crown molding and already made decorative accents from Home Depot to add some personality.

After that it was finally time to paint and decorate!

Both Alex and I are super pleased with the way it came out. It came out way better than I even imagined. We put some tiles we found at Home Depot as well on the floor and added some candles. All though it seemed like sort of a big project we got the whole thing done on one Saturday. It's a super fun addition to our bedroom and I can't wait to decorate it for fall and Christmas.

Oh, and sorry for the quality of the photos in this post. They were all taken on my iPhone and some pulled from my instagram.