Day two of the I Saw Red challenge and it is starting to work! I am actively looking around for patches of red, and starting to think how I could use them in my crafting. Good.

What struck me the most today is how drops of rain pooled and shone against the red petals of the geraniums (or are they pelargoniums? I always get confused) in my window boxes. It was a splash of colour against a plumbeous sky.

Raindrops on red

Sara Duckett of Sadie Olive designs is running a fun I Saw Red challenge this week—post a photograph with something red in it as many times as you can (thanks to Artsymama for pointing me in Sara’s direction). Now I have never had much use for red. Truth be told, I don’t much like it—it is too bold, too bright, too much. So this sounds like a great way to stretch myself and broaden my colour palette. My first entry for the challenge is, predictably, a picture of Nicco (who loves red and has plenty of red clothes).

Nicco among the shrubs in Sardinia

I rather like how his red t-shirt stands out among the ochre and dull green of the Mediterranean scrubland around him…

Her story reads like a sad romance novel. Pia was the beauty of the family, the prettiest of my great aunts. In the late Thirties, she got engaged to an aeroplane pilot, but the Second World War put paid to her dreams. Her fiance was killed in action. She became one of the many widows before marriage.

Although Pia was still very young at the time, she never married. Whether she didn’t find anyone else, or didn’t even look, I don’t know. She died when I was still relatively small so my childhood memories of her are sketchy—I remember an old but cheerful spinster who was very much part of her wider family’s life.

Back then, I didn’t know about the death that had changed her life. But ever since I found out, I have wanted to tell her story, to make sure it is not forgotten. The Theme Thursday challenge gave me the excuse. So here is Pia before the war, stars in her big brown eyes, a hint of a smile playing on her lips. Beautiful, happy, and blissfully ignorant of the tragedy that time was about to bring.

Pia in the mid-1930s

Niccolo is off for a few days with the nonni. It is the first time he has been without us since Caterina was born and I was a bit worried that he might have a difficult time. Looks like I fretted for nothing. He couldn’t wait to hop on the aeroplane with Nonna last Tuesday and he has been having a whale of a time ever since. He was apparently ‘too busy’ to speak to me on the phone and rightly so, considering he absolutely has to play football, do some gardening, walk the dogs and go and look for enemies in the woodland (dressed in full knight regalia) every day.

Nicco the diver

Oh and wear his diving suit (even though he is a fair few miles away from the sea). Caterina and I are joining him tomorrow. It will be her first aeroplane journey—I wonder how she will take to it?

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.

I can barely believe it, but I made it. Yesterday was Manfredi’s birthday and I managed to have the booklet (and the card, and the cake) done in time. OK, so I got it all finished at 8pm, thus delaying our supper, but it was still before he got down to opening the presents.

Even better, he really liked the booklet, almost as much as he liked his other present, the Wii (because some people age without ever growing up). Or at least he lied very convincingly about liking it.

Two of my favourite pages from the booklet

So now I can lie down and sleep for the entire weekend. Or, more likely, lie down for five minutes and make armour and feed children for the entire weekend.

Niccolo is so much into knights just now that I thought it would be fun to have a medieval supper. I have done this kind of stuff before—complete with authentic recipes from Le Menagier de Paris and Maestro Martino—and love it, but it rarely is a hit with other people. Manfredi endures it patiently, everyone else usually runs away as fast as they can.

So imagine my joy when it turned out Nicco loves it too. He wasn’t too keen on eating without forks initially (he must be the only four-year-old who doesn’t like to dirty his hands) but really enjoyed using a trencher (in a small deviation from authenticity, I used a double trencher for him—wooden board and slices of stale bread—to contain the damage to the tablecloth), and eating by candlelight. Much to my suprise, he even took to the idea that knights often started their supper with fruit and gobbled up an entire apple before his roast beef. Sadly, his enthusiasm did not extend to the Menagier’s split pea soup and Maestro Martino’s swiss chard tart. Guess I’ll have to find another ruse to make him eat vegetables.

Sir Niccolo at the table

He liked the whole thing so much that he asked to eat like knights again yesterday. This was unexpected and, in Manfredi’s case, not entirely welcome. Therefore, he tried to trick Niccolo by subtly adding modern comforts (such as fork, plates and a little electricity) to our knightly table—only to be stopped in his tracks by the little one.

“But papa, knights did not have forks. But papa, knights did not have plates. But papa, knights did not have lights.”

So there was nothing to do but eat roast chicken off wooden trenchers with our fingers in the encroaching darkness. Well, at least two of us thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

Nicco’s drawing of Julius Caesar, complete with sword, shield and…crown!

Now, however, things may be about to take a turn for the worse as Nicco is developing a fascination for Julius Caesar and the Romans. We have already added a Roman shield and gladius to our armoury, and included a Roman re-enactment video in Nicco’s Youtube staple of medieval joust re-enactments and Fifth Gear car tests. So I expect we will soon have to try hosting a Roman banquet. But then even I will have a problem at the prospect of eating liquamen-soaked snails!

What a packed day. Nicco ran the first race of his life, and I had so much fun watching him. There is little as cute as a bunch of three to five year-old children engaged in a relay race. The things they come up with—like the kid who did the entire bean bag leg of the race (bean bag on the head, arms out) with his head bent forward. The bean bag kept sliding of course, but no amount of coaching from teacher or parent could persuade that little boy to change his mind and lift his head up. That was the way he was going to run and that was it.

Going fast

I have also discovered that Nicco is fast, very fast. I always knew he could run—he started to run practically on the same day he started to walk—but hadn’t realised just how fast he could go until I saw him alongside other small children. That said, he hardly took off like the wind when his team mate handed him the baton (or rather, the ring). He stood stock still for a while, waiting and waiting for the teacher to signal he could start running. Clearly, he is not very clear on the rules of a relay race!

Only die-hard fans of Thomas the Tank Engine (or the mothers thereof) will get the “nearly there” quote from the Spencer book, but I do feel much like Edward, a slow, old steam engine, trying to beat shiny new Spencer in a race to the duke’s summer house. Except that —in my quest to finish the little family booklet that will be my husband’s birthday present—I am trying to beat Time itself, so the odds are definitely against me. After all, there is no chance that Time will magically fall asleep just before the end of the race, thus letting me win with relative ease.

So I am scrambling to get as many pages done as quickly as possible. Here is the latest one, which is, unsurprisingly, another showcase for a picture of Caterina and Niccolo.

Proud brother

As with the previous page, I am also entering this for the Wednesday Stamper art challenge (create something that has a the word art, and at least one stamped image, in it). Although, if truth be told, the stamping here is very subtle—only the numbers 14 and 21, which are the children’s birth dates, and are from the Oxford Impressions range. Other than that it is mostly a hybrid collage—a digital collage as background, with a photo, some lace and the title glued on top.

Seeing it alongside the other, I am starting to think the book pages all look a bit samey, but then I am sure my husband will enjoy the subjects!

After last week’s wobble, Nicco is doing rather well. He still has a rough time when I feed Caterina—he usually does his worst to attract attention then—and occasionally overreacts to reprimands, but getting him to snap out of his mood is becoming easier. Or perhaps I am learning how to handle him (hint: give him as much attention as possible, and defuse any tense situation with humour; never tell him off unless he has done something absolutely unforgivable). Still, I suspect this will be a steep learning curve for both of us.

It helps that Caterina sleeps most of the time. This allows me to spend plenty of one-to-one time with Nicco—a result of which is that I have now become quite adept at making helms and armour. Archery, however, remains beyond me. Being thoroughly beaten by a not-quite-four-year-old is fairly humbling experience. Especially when he then adds innocently: “But mummy why are you so bad at all sports?” Hmm, perhaps because I read, drew and crafted during the time I should have spent exercising?

Talking of which (crafting that is, not exercising) I miraculously managed to find a spare minute or thirty to work on the family book I am giving my husband as his birthday present. Which is a good thing, considering his birthday is now just nine days away. Here is my latest page—now I only have four more pages to go, plus the front and back covers. At this rate, I may even finish the book in time.

Children in a pocket

Incidentally, I am also entering this for the Created by hand challenge, which is all about using textiles in your projects (I used lace here to decorate the tag that’s in the bookpage pocket). That’s because I no longer have time to make any dedicated effort for any challenge—beyond keeping Nicco entertained while I feed Caterina, that is!