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

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.

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!

Phew, it feels forever since I last entered a challenge. Of course I had more pressing priorities, but it is good to find a few minutes to do something unabashedly fun. And the 4×4 Friday theme—florals—could not have been better for me. I love using flower images in collages, and they make the perfect backdrop to show off a rosy-cheeked Caterina.

Five-day-old Caterina

The poor thing doesn’t look too great in this picture, but I love that she is smiling, so I used it anyway. No doubt she will never forgive me when she grows up!

Time for stealth. Nicco and I have embarked on a secret project. Manfredi’s birthday is coming up in a month and we are making a little memory booklet for him.

We began it yesterday. I cut the base pages, folded them and glued them into a booklet, while Nicco made a wax crayon and a pencil drawing. The idea now is to paint each base page, then add the collages, photographs, drawings, perhaps even poetry. Whatever takes our fancy, really.

The biggest challenge for me is to keep it suitably masculine in both imagery and colours. I realised just how much I use pretty ‘girly’ flowers and butterflies when I worked on a patterned paper for the book today and found myself somewhat short of collage elements.

The first steps of the booklet: Nicco’s drawing and mypatterned paper

I ended up using mostly old letters, stamps and newspaper cuttings, and I am not sure I like the end result. Still, it is a beginning, and I have a full month ahead of me to perfect it. This is going to be both stretching and fun. Let’s just hope Manfredi likes it!

Ohh, I am so happy. I have handed in all my articles and now I can rest and play while I wait for the baby to be born. Over the last few days, I honestly thought I’d never be able to relax like this. I didn’t even get (too) angry at the news that my long-awaited parcel with a bunch of Stampington magazine is delayed at customs (whyever for?) and won’t be delivered until tomorrow.

And look! I even managed to sneak in a collage. The prompt was 4×4 Friday’s families theme. It was the perfect opportunity to do something with one of the many lovely pictures of my grandmother with her sisters and their mother. I love those photos because they are a snapshot of everyday life—reading the papers, chatting, studying, sewing—and yet everyone looks so incredibly happy. You really get the feeling it was a loving, contented family.

My grandmother Nina, her sister Pia and their mother Chiarina reading the newspaper

It didn’t last of course. My great-grandmother passed away not too long after the pictures were taken, one of the sisters moved away to follow her husband, another bore a tragic loss. Which makes it all the more important for me to capture that moment of pure joy and shared love.

Purple seems to be cropping up rather often in online challenges. After the purple and gold combo for Mixed Media Monday a couple of weeks ago, Wednesday Stamper is now running a purple challenge.

This time, however, inspiration struck a lot closer to home than the improbable collage of dancer-turned-empress Theodora, which I made for Mixed Media Monday.

Somehow, purple’s imperial connection made me think of my great-great-grandmother Caterina, a woman so formidable her own family called her Caterina the Great, after the Russian empress.

Caterina the great

She didn’t have the easiest of personalities. An aristocrat, she had a hard time adapting to a world where titles meant increasingly little. She once confided to a friend that “a man who is not a noble does not look like a man to me.” She also sent away a hapless postman who had dared tried to make a delivery to Mrs Caterina (rather than Lady Caterina) saying: “There is no Mrs Caterina here—there never was and never will be.”

Her children had a healthy dose of respect for her, and if they occasionally forgot to treat her with due deference, Caterina was quick to put them in their place. Once, she met her son, my great-grandfather Raffaele Alfredo, in the street. He made the dreadful mistake of not taking off his hat when he approached her.

“What is your hat still doing on your head?” she chastised him.

“But mama, you take your hat off to a lady, and you are just my mother,” he said.

“And what is your mother—a dog?” she replied.

So here is my little tribute to Caterina, who had the pride and demeanour of an empress, if not the title. Well, this, and the fact that my soon-to-be-born daughter will be named Caterina after her.

Well, after the doom and gloom of yesterday’s piece, something altogether more fun and light-hearted (although I still seem to be hooked on a green colour scheme one way or another).

Inspire Me Thursday’s challenge was all about wallpaper. We never really had it at home except for a very brief time when I was about 14 or 15 and my mother went for a very sophisticated beige wallpaper in her bedroom. Our cat loved it so much it shredded it to pieces in a matter of days—and when I saw the wallpaper prompt I just felt I had to record that momentous event, which put all of us off wallpaper for the rest of our lives!

Kitten loves wallpaper collage

However, I was rather short of raw material for this collage, so I am grateful I could find it all online—the vintage wallpaper is from Stock Exchange and the kitten from Karen’s Whimsy. Other than that, it was just a question of designing the background paper (a digital collage) and gluing it all together. Lots of easy fun.

P.S.: some of you know I am a writer by trade and a journal-keeper for passion. Now I am considering running an online journaling class for artists and scrapbooking enthusiasts. Anyone interested out there?

Last Wednesday’s challenge at Wednesday Stamper sounded deceptively simple—anything featuring the first letter of your first name, as well as, of course, a stamp. Something personal, I thought. Except that I hadn’t banked on it being so painful. Perhaps it is because I am going through a difficult period in my life, but I found this extremely hard to do.

Hope this caged spirit will fly free again some time soon

Initially, I wanted to use a picture of myself, but it started cutting too close to the bone. So I chose a picture of one of grandmother’s nieces, a cute smiling girl, and wrote the journal entry to the third person—as if it had all happened to her. It made the piece slightly easier to work on. That said, I kept fiddling and amending, changing and tinkering for nearly a week. I wasn’t sure about the colour scheme, but I wanted to have a bleak black, for how I feel now, and a lively green to symbolise my hope for a better future. And I wanted to use both a bird flying free from the cage, and my son’s artwork, because I need to believe things will improve soon.

I am still not happy with the result, but it is time to let go—before it becomes even more painful.

P.S.: for curious minds, the journal entry reads: Look at her. Sunny, smiling, happy. She believed she could do everything and the world was hers for the taking. But then she changed. Choices and circumstances killed the spark in her eyes. Like a novel Sisiphus, she pushed the boulder up the slope only to see it roll down the other side one time too many. Now she is bitter, lost, adrift. Tired of fighting and of trying to rebuild. But perhaps the little girl is still alive inside her and one day her eyes will sparkle again.

The latest theme for Mixed Media Monday is men, and as soon as I saw it I had no doubt. It was time to unearth the photographs of my grandfather, his father and his grandfather and do something with them.

The piece evolved naturally—painted and sanded cardboard for the base, a scrap of muslin rubbed with distress ink, a collage background paper made by scanning and juxtaposing vintage ephemera with a sienna canvas I painted a while ago, and, drawing the eye, the pictures of my ancestors.

Mixed media take on my ancestors for the Mixed Media Monday Men challenge

It is funny how they really looked like one another and yet I know their personalities were very different. Ferdinando, my great-great-grandfather, was a one-time soldier (a bad one, by his own account) and a fencing master who gave up the sword to become a civil servant and thus please my great-great-grandmother, Angela, a concrete, practical type who rather preferred him to have a steadier job. He had a quirky sense of humour and loved to journal—many of his entries are on the back of old military papers, or on photographs and are addressed to the descendants he would one day have.

Armando, his son, was an elegant, quiet type who died at 33, leaving behind a young, penniless wife and four children, who all went to live with different relatives. Nando, my grandfather, was brought up by Ferdinando and Angela, but none of Angela’s practical streak rubbed on to him. Despite a successful banking career, he remained a naive dreamer all his life—to the point that people occasionally took advantage of him. He was incredibly fond of children and animals and a really really good man. I still miss him—and I even miss the other two, even though I never met them.