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.

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!

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.

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.

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.