Category: summer

July: Around here

This year summer caught us by surprise. We headed up to the mountains for a long weekend, but the epic heat wave forced us to make our stay a little longer.
Ten days on and, apart from having the kids with me all day long, we are enjoying this early and unexpected summer holiday. 
Hope the season is being kind to you! How are you escaping the heat this summer?

This week in pictures

So like everyone else on the blog sphere, from time to time I will be sharing a summary of my life through pictures. I take most of my pictures using my phone, it’s always with me and it doesn’t require much effort. The only phone app I sometime use is Instagram. I do love Instagram and its filters, the vintage feel is quite cool and you can easily turn uninteresting pictures in more appealing ones. My Instagram pictures are posted on twitter as soon as I take them, I usually give it some thoughts before shooting, trying to catch more interesting subjects. The phone camera is for everything else, including videos, and the pics stay on my phone until needed.
This week I’m sharing both Instagram and phone photos.
The Instagram topic for this week is the beach! We are having an unbearable heat wave and spending most of the day at the sea.
The rest of the time is spent having fun watching Miss O doing new things…like standing up holding on furniture and trying to climb out of her cot…so much fun!
The photo layout has been edited using a free iPhone app called “photosplit”….it does what I need and it’s easy to use. Shame about the app tag on the final layout.

Summer memories

I love collecting memorabilia from the beach over the summer months. I remember  collecting all sorts of pebbles, wood sticks, roots, shells and whatever I could find on the seaside when I was young. But really never got to use any of these things, they used to end up in the bin as soon as we were back home from the holidays.

This year I decided I would make something to remember the summer days we spent in Italy. I collected some halved cane sticks from our favourite beach in Roccelletta (Calabria, Southern Italy). I cleaned them from all the sand and cut them to the same length leaving some rough edges.  I had already bought one of those deep frames from Ikea from the bargain corner a while ago, which hadn’t found any use, so far. I glued the sticks to a cut-to-size 300g cream paper which G brought me from paper source and used a 2B pencil to write some text at the bottom.

I haven’t found a place on the wall for it yet, but I already like the idea of looking at it during the next winter months and remember the sunny days we spent relaxing on the beach.

Summer sketches – Part 2





Here is another batch of sketches done in Pescina (L’Aquila). It has been very hot during the past week, and was almost impossible to stay outside during the day because of the heat….got sunburnt one morning at 10am while sketching under the sun! Best time was in the evening around 8pm when the sun was setting behing the mountains, the colours were magnificent…not very well captured in the sketches above 🙁

Summer sketches – Part 1



We are finally off to Italy for a well deserved summer break! First stop is Pescina, up on the mountains of Abruzzo, in central Italy, to visit my partner’s family.
The town is in the middle of what used to be a lake, il Fucino, drained in 1875. Nowadays it’s a patchwork of cultivated land surrounded by the Sirente-Velino and Vallelonga mountains.