DIY kitteh wedding invitations, or: why cats don't make good models

We thought it would be great to feature our cat, Zulay, on our wedding invitations, because she can't be present at the wedding. This way we can make her part of it somehow, because, well, she is our baby.

I asked Ork, a friend of ours, who will also be photographing our wedding, to do the cat photo shoot. He was very onboard for a kitteh photo shoot! However, a photo shoot with a cat is NOT an easy thing to do… Even though our Zulay is quite a docile cat, of course she hardly did anything we wanted her to do!

I had sewn a heart-shaped pillow and let her get used to it in the weeks before the shoot. She slept on it regularly, but during the shoot she refused to lie on it. She only stood on it to munch the snack we had put there to lure her into getting on it. Oh well.

We wanted to shoot a photo of Zulay under a tiny DIY "wedding arch" but it made her too nervous. So Plan B was to first take a picture of the basket with the arch, then a picture of the cat in the basket without the arch, and to photoshop the two together later. But Zulay turned out to be a star at looking cranky and annoyed.

She also showed a great "WTF" attitude when I added other props.

Finally, we ended up just holding the arch still, with a hand that was to be photoshopped out of the picture later.

We also tried taking some pictures of us and the cat together.

But turned necks don't look very pretty.

And our dear kitteh does have some very sharp nails.

The only set-up that worked out exactly as planned was the cake eating shot. Zulay is fond of whipped cream, so I went to the confectioner to get a look-a-like wedding cake piece. He had only one that resembled wedding cake, but it had a hard cream on top of it.

So I explained to the confectioner that I wanted to photograph my cat eating from this cake, and asked whether he could add some whipped cream. He first looked at me with great surprise and I was afraid I had offended him by suggesting to waste his creation on an animal… but then he (and the other customers present) had a good laugh about it and he changed the whole decoration on top for free, provided that I would e-mail him the pictures we made!

And indeed — Zulay did not hesitate a moment when we put the cake in front of her:

Eventually we just let Zulay be for some time, and she settled on her favorite spot on the couch. Then we placed a white bouquet (that I had picked up at the florist for a couple of euros) next to her. Amazingly, she let that all happen and we got several really pretty photographs out of it! This is the one we eventually picked for the invitation:

This is how they finally turned out: