I can’t believe how crazy the last ten days have been. Lots of work, nursery school singalongs, birthday parties and playground jaunts meant that I had no time to update the site, let alone put together a collage, digital or otherwise. But my friend Leslie—who is even busier than me with writing and childcare but manages to work some friendship magic anyway—has made one for me. It came unexpected on a week when I know she is really pushed for time, and is much much appreciated. Thank you Leslie (and yes, I’ll post the nursery school singalong video soon, I promise!).

Leslie is the best

When I first started paper-crafting, I had a passion for photo montages. I’d stick Niccolo’s head on a Victorian boy or one of Raphael’s angels and turn them into cards with gusto. It had been a while since I last did that, but last week I came across an image of a Victorian baby girl which I could not pass up. It just screamed at me to be montaged with Caterina’s face and set against a pretty floral background.

Caterina as a Victorian baby

And since I also wanted to use a stamp with it, I decided to give it a square shape and use it for Wednesday Stamper’s latest challenge. I am conscious it is no great artwork—but it was a heck of a lot of fun to make.

It was a casual discovery. I was flicking through some photographs of my grandparents when I came across several pictures of a very young man whom I had never seen before. I know my extended family pretty well, and I could have sworn he was not someone I knew. At the same time, though, he looked vaguely familiar, and in any case it seemed somewhat bizarre for my grandparents to have kept so many relics of a stranger. So I asked my father and it emerged the young man was his uncle Alberto—my grandfather’s brother—of whose existence I had not been aware until then.

I was shocked. Over the years, both my grandmother and my great-aunt kept our family history alive by sharing their stories with me and my cousins. But no one had ever mentioned this uncle. From what I have since gathered, he died very young. I suppose his memories were too painful, too raw, and my family found it easier not to speak of him than to deal with them—in the same way as my father and his brothers never speak of the little sister they lost when she was just a toddler.

Brothers: my grandfather with his brother Alberto a short time before he died

But the pictures, religiously stored for more than sixty years, tell me he was never forgotten. And this little collage, which I made for Theme Thursday, is to ensure that he will continue to be remembered.

I was tidying up my files—not something I’d ordinarily do of my own free will, but my husband threatened all sorts of dire retributions—when I came across a little digital collage I had made a few months ago. It was February 4, I had just hit the seventh month of my pregnancy and felt like a hot air balloon.

I thought I felt like a hot air balloon then…imagine now!

Ha. Little did I know—I was positively skinny then. You should see me now. The Montgolfier brothers would be proud of me.

Some people have been kind enough to email me about the background paper I made for the pink and brown Theme Thursday challenge. I thought it could be fun to make the paper available for download so others can use it in their projects.

Free background paper for collages, scrapbooking and mixed media art

If anyone wants it, here is the Letter version (for Americans) and here is the A4 one (for the rest of the world). Be aware that both files, which come in high-resolution PDF format, are relatively big (about 10 MB) so they may take a while to download. If you can’t bear the wait, a slightly lower res version is also available in JPG format (here for Letter, and here for A4).

If you do use this paper, I’d love to see what you make with it—just post a comment below with a link to your blog or picture trail, or email me to let me know what you have done. A link back to this blog post would also be much appreciated.

Oh, and one more thing: I found the paper worked best when printed on a suitably thick matte paper.

Easter came and went and I am still pregnant. My doc seemed convinced that I’d go into labour well before we started munching on chocolate eggs—she even told me not to do any heavy physical work around the house to avoid an early delivery—but, unless something happens over the next couple of days, it looks like Caterina will be an April baby.

Well, the closer she is born to the due date, the better, even though these last few weeks of being constantly tired, huge and winded are nigh-on unbearable. But at the end of it there will be a new baby, pink and round and smiling. I was reminded of it—of the chubbiness, the joy, the wonder—as I put together a little 4×4 for the Theme Thursday challenge.

The prompt is pink and brown, which happens to be one of my favourite colour combinations and the one I chose for most of the baby’s clothes. So it was sort of obvious that I’d go for a little girl’s theme. But it wasn’t until I stumbled upon an old picture of one of my father’s cousins from the late 1930s—she just looked so soft, cute, happy—that both the piece and my excitement at Caterina’s impending arrival clicked into place.

Whey-hey, new baby coming soon!

The rest came off easily—a rosy digital collage as background paper, two stamped images, including a reminder that “all tomorrows are in the seeds of today,” and even the prospect of carrying around my enormous body for three more weeks seemed a little less daunting. The thing is I am having a baby girl soon, and that’s just great.

I stumbled upon the 4×4 challenge today, and decided I just had to take it. It is about using any Da Vinci lady (except Mona Lisa) in your artwork. I love Leonardo’s women, so I couldn’t let this opportunity pass—even though the challenge is up tomorrow.

Woman in stone digital collage

It was also the prompt I needed to finish working on a digital collage I had started back in—gasp!—December, and never finished. It uses three stamps (Woman in Stone by Stampington, clock by Non Sequitur, Alpha and Beta by Stampers Anonymous), which I stamped in black on white paper, scanned, resized, digitally coloured and layered to a sheet music background. Simple and fun—and I can’t believe it took me so long to complete it. I guess I had just forgotten about it until the challenge came up!

Ah best laid plans, and all that. We didn’t manage to make our trip yesterday, although Nicco still had a good time hunting for his eggs and opening the presents in his Easter basket. The silver lining of staying at home, however, was that I put together a little entry for Theme Thursday’s inchies and moos challenge.

I am not used to making something this small and it was rather interesting to try my hand at it. The upside is that it is superquick—instant gratification. The downside is that I crammed too much detail in the inchie, as I would have done on a bigger piece.

Digital collage inchie of my great-aunt Letizia (blown up version on the right)

I am entering it for the challege anyway, though, because it is rather important to me on a personal level. It is centred on a childhood picture of my great-aunt Letizia, who babysat me often as a child. My memories of her are sketchy: I remember she had hair of an improbable yellow, thread veins on her pearly white skin and a fragile, antique doll I loved.

She had no children and died relatively young, and after her husband also passed away, a few years ago, I don’t think we remembered her as much as we should have done. So this is my tribute to her memory, and a belated thank you for all the times she bore with me when I was a child.

Another belated entry, this time for the Inspire Me Thursday challenge, which was all about including inkblots in your work. Unusually for me, I didn’t start out with an idea. I just went on, produced a blot which ended up looking like a butterfly and that sparked inspiration.

Sisters digital collage for Inspire Me Thursday challenge

I am not entirely sure what the mental association was, but it made me think of my grandmother Nina and her sisters. I have several pictures of them taken in the early and mid-1930s, looking happy and carefree.

It was a brief moment of joy, before their lives were turned upside down by the Second World War. They were all affected—one of my great aunts lost her fiance in the war and never married, my grandmother used to run across the fields under a deluge of bombs to beg farmers for scraps of food that she could give to my father and my uncle, and they all struggled to survive through each day. So I thought I’d capture those happy days before tragedy struck.

Incidentally, this started life as a collage proper, but then my printer died on me, so I scanned the inkblot and turned the whole idea into a digital collage.

Wednesday Stamper’s weekly challenge is about drawing inspiration from your garden. Urban girl that I am, I don’t have a garden—but made do with inspiration from my (not-so-verdant) balcony and pot plants to produce this little collage (using a butterfly stamp by Starving Artistamps). 

Garden collage entry for Wednesday Stamper’s challenge

It makes me dream of spring.