Hi,
I just dived into the atahualpa theme since it seems like the best solution for my site.
It seems difficult though to change the widgets to have three background-images (one for the top, one to adjust for different lengths and the finishing one for the bottom).
Is it possible? Please stop me if you know so that I can look for a different solution before spending hours on it!

Are you talking about the sidebars or widgets. The sidebar is the entire area which is made up of one or more widgets. Each widget could (depending on how it is coded) have a header, middle and footer..or not.

You can specify a background for aany particular widget, or 'type' of widget using CSS Inserts. You will need to look at teh generated source of a page to determine the actual ID= or CLASS= to use in your CSS selector.

yes I am talking about the widgets. I would like to have all of the ones in the left sidebar with a vertically expandable background. Will look into the boxes, since it seems that they are all a bit different depending on which kind of widget or what content is in them, it might be a challenge..