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!

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.

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.