I am no longer a knight. After fighting some serious battles, taking injuries from sword and lance and even falling off my imaginary horse, I have been mercilessly demoted to armourer once again. That’s because Niccolo decided he needed a helm and I had to make one pronto.

The world’s greatest knight…and his mum

It is when faced with this kind of challenge that I am grateful for the Internet. I mean, I have no idea how to make a helm. Or rather I hadn’t, until a few hours ago. Then I hit Google, and found helm patterns and instructions on the Cleveland Museum of Art website. A couple of scissor cuts and a few staples later, we had a helm (sans visor because Nicco could not wait to wear it).

Knight in shining armour

Whey hey! I dared harbour hopes of returning to knighthood. Alas, my son can’t decide whether he’d rather be a knight or an archer. So I was moved to bow making duties—and now that the bow is ready and strung, it is time to look up how to fletch an arrow…Meanwhile Caterina laughed it all off.

Whey-hey! The articles I had to do by Thursday (or before the baby’s birth, whichever comes first) are ready. OK, I still have to tweak a couple of things on one of them but that shouldn’t take too long, so I am a free woman.

I know this sounds rather ridiculous, but I did sleep very little in the last few nights because I was terrified I wouldn’t make it on time. Instead, thanks in good part to Manfredi, who took care of Niccolo for the whole weekend, and to my good writer friend Leslie, who made sure I wasn’t writing utter balderdash, I made it! Now I can stop worrying and resume crafting.

Talking of which, the only thing I produced in the last few days was a little cone inspired by a much more sophisticated one I saw on Linda Albrecht’s blog (via Artsymama).

Yum, yum, a spring cone full of sweets

It was a fun project because it was quick and simple enough to make together with Niccolo. He loved it—especially stuffing the cone with sweets and chocolate eggs, which he then proceeded to eat at record speed.

But now that the pieces are done I can look forward to starting on some other idea, and perhaps take up a challenge or two. And of course the baby has my permission to be born any time she likes.

How I wish I lived in California, where Artsymama was teaching her Flower Banner class last week. Or, at the very least, I wish I had been faster in checking her blog and Etsy shop, where she was selling some of her banner kits. By the time I realised they were for sale, they were already sold out.

Kit or no kit, however, Artsymama’s banner idea was too good to pass up, so I adapted it into a project I could do with Niccolo—a flower banner with his name on it. Which meant using cheap leftover supplies (Ryman the Stationer’s pastel paper from last year, pattern paper out of my own printer, a remnant of crepe paper from Christmas and millinery flowers which dated back to Nicco’s christening…three years ago!) rather than pretty vintage stuff.

Niccolo’s flower banner takes pride of place among books and CDs

Of course, the end result is nowhere near as lovely as the Artsymama original, but Nicco and I had great fun making the banner and hanging it. It was good for letter and name recognition too. So thank you, Artsymama!

My preschooler, that is. Niccolo is back from his holiday with the grandparents (the “nonni”) and, of course, we have resumed our artistic endeavours. Just now, he has three favourite activities, in this order:

1. “drawing” letters and words. No matter how much I call it writing, he insists he is drawing. He started off “drawing” single letters, but has now graduated to two or three words (papa, mummy, nonno). He has also tried painting the letter N with a brush.

Look, I have drawn the word papa!

2. painting with a big brush. I had a stroke of genius one day (if I say so myself..) and bought him a brush and a roller of the type used for household paint. He loves them both—especially the brush—because it allows him to paint in big fat strokes.

Big brush strokes are great

3. collage. I guess it’s in the genes, as I love collageing, but he has really got into it recently. He is not quite making shapes out of his scraps of paper yet, but loves to mix and match colours and textures. In the latest collage he made—yesterday, for nonno—he even added cardboard and a few scraps of fabric.

Oh and all this art is paying off at least on one front. It may be a coincidence but he has become a lot more skilled in describing colours. Yesterday he told me he went with nonno to the market and bought some “dark gold” honey. Then he qualified: “It was between golden and brown.” Which is already a better description than my colour-challenged husband can ever hope to achieve!

There is a woman out there who is my parenting hero. She is the friend of a friend—and the proud mother of four-year-old triplets and a two-year-old boy. If you ever chance upon her blog, you’ll soon discover that she has more energy and does more stuff with her four preschoolers than I can ever hope to accomplish with my single three-and-a-half-year-old boy.

Paper egg painted with salt drip

When I feel shattered in the evening—which, let’s face it, happens pretty much every day—I wonder how she does it. Oh, and she also finds the time to scour the Internet for crafty projects to do with her kids. The good news for me is that she shares her findings on her blog. Through her, I discovered The Learning Box Preschool programme and, lately, Preschool Express—a great resource for seasonal children’s crafts. I found a couple of really good Easter ideas there, which Niccolo and I immediately set out to try.

My favourite was painting paper eggs. Jean Warren, the woman behind Preschool Express, suggests painting them with a mix of tempera and cornstarch for a porcelain-like finish. But I suffer from a deep-set inability to follow instructions without making changes, so I decided to use salt drip instead. Nicco and I had already used it to decorate Valentine’s hearts and it gives the paper a lovely raised, rough texture.

So I made the salt drip (1 cup of flour, 1/3 cup of salt, food colouring and enough water to reach a dripping consistency) and we painted away. The end result made Nicco “really proud”—his words, not mine.

Perhaps it’s because I am a crafts addict, but I like to get my son involved in painting, collageing, stamping and drawing.

Niccolo’s abstract painting

For me, little beats the time we sit side by side at the kitchen table, smearing temperas over a piece of paper, our fingers stained with paint.I like to let Niccolo free as much as possible. I reckon he already does plenty of directed work when he goes to nursery school—drwa yourself, paint a car, decorate a box—with the teachers finishing off the job to make sure each child brings home something cute or, at least, vaguely recognisable.

Niccolo’s art graces the wall in my study

But I am not really interested in whether the end result is any good—after all, I am not trying to raise a young Picasso. Instead, I want to stimulate his creativity, his thinking processes. So I provide as many materials as I can, from finger paint to crayons, scraps and stickers, and let him express himself. I love to see how what starts as a dinosaur changes into a cargo ship halfway through the painting—and usually ends up as an abstract blob of colour.

And of course, I love that art has become a way for us to be together. He is getting increasingly involved in my projects, or we start a new one together. When i began prepping the pages for an altered book with tempera paints, he joined in. OK, the pages won’t be prepped to perfection, but the shared moments, the fun we have and the pride he takes in ‘his’ altered book—not to mention the fact that, at three and a half, he knows what an altered book is—are priceless.

One of Niccolo’s altered book pages

And now we have started work on a Spring and Easter collage book full of pretty little pictures of birds, eggs, flowers and rabbits. We might not finish it in time for Easter—but it is the making it together that really matters.