Callaloo Soup

Drinks From Cup

As a follow up to the saga of Eats With Fork, we present Drinks from Cup!

Having mastered his bottles and sippy cup, Kieran has moved on. He loves drinking from our glasses when we hold them for him. Today when he asked to drink from my glass I decided to give him his cup without the "sippy" part attached. He loved that! I was surpised when he picked it up and got it to his mouth in one motion. Granted there was major spillage (Exhibit A: his food is swimming), and he ended up totally drenched, but some of it did make it into his mouth. I just can't keep up with him!

September Projects for Little Black Dress

Another month where I am gushing over the kit from Little Black Dress. It is called Sweet Elegance and it is simply gorgeous.

I admit it scared me at first, as it was so soft and feminine. I almost put out a desperate call for baby girl photos, but then I pulled myself together and got to work.

This page was inspired by the Studio Calico card which had an excerpt from a book: "Chapter 3 French Food". Right up my alley. And since I am a freak who takes pictures of food all the time, I just had to go to my Food and Drink photo folder to find and print out these photos. I used my Slice to cut out the triangles to make the bunting under the title.

 

I actually made this card last using up scraps of patterned papers. I also used the clear backing that the Prima flowers came on. it's the part over the tag that has words and phrases in white.

This page was inspired by all the math and school related bits in the kit. I am a math geek and proud of it! I loved the idea of making a girly page about math!

 

This is the first page I made with the kit. I was determined to whip out a boy page with such a girly kit! Like I've mentioned before all these kits really do have something for every style and page subject.

Finally a boy page that's soft and, dare I say it, pink! The jumping off point for this page was the game card that said "Tell about a time you were proud of yourself" . And as luck would have it that same day Mr. Kieran was very proud of the fact that he ate his snack using a teaspoon and not his baby spoon. I used the Slice here again to cut the two tags. I am seriously in love with this page! I will be using this colour combination again for sure!

Head on over to the Little Black Dress blog to see lots of other ideas using this kit.

5 Product Challenge

Our theme for September on Write.Click.Scrapbook is 5 Products. See how the team interprets this and scraps with a 5 product limitation! Here is my layout

You can see more details here and check out the entire gallery here.

Do you think you can limit yourself to scrapping a page with just five products?

What to do when you don't have a fancy recipe holder

I've started tearing recipes out of magazines (because we are seriously running out of storage space for my, ahem, collection). But then the question becomes: "In a small kitchen where do I put the recipe when I want to use it?" Enter the trusty clothespin.

Clothespin + cabinet door handle = nifty recipe holder. And yes, that pasta dish was as tasty as it looks!

A New Month, A New Design

I've been thinking about changing the design of the blog for a while. I was really into the minimalist clean and simple look earlier this year, but lately it just hasn't felt right, hasn't felt like me, and certainly doesn't represent what Callaloo Soup is all about. So welcome to my new look! I wanted something that was more organic, and a banner that reflected my tagline "a little bit of everything".

A bit about the design elements

To create the banner and side bar elements I used digital elements from the following designers.

The kraft paper is by Katie Pertiet

The graph paper, border brush,  butterfly, stitch, brackets, circle stamp, and word brushes are by Karla Dudley

The thread spool, button and embroidered tag are by Jen Allyson

The doily, linen flower, butterfly pin, crochet trim and vintage camera are by Kitschy Digitals

The typewriter is by John Olsen

The masking tape is byPugley Pixel

The Twitter bird is by Cinnamon Girl

Fonts used are Mom's Typewriter and Century Gothic

Let's Take a Tour

Just under the banner you will see the navigation bar. The titles are pretty self explanatory, clicking on them will take you either to a category, for example Scrapbooking or Kieran, or to a page like the About Me or About Callaloo Soup. Some are to extrenal sites, like the Tumblr link.

The top left sidebar is a little introduction to me and the blog, and under that you will find various links related to what I do. My design work and other sites/blogs that I am a part of. You can also find ways to contact me, by e-mail or to subscribe to the blog, or  find me on Twitter.

Over on the right sidebar you can take a look at my favourite 10 posts, see what projects I am working on in the current month, or explore the blog some more by checking out the categories, archives or recent posts. I've also added links to two photo albums, one with scrapbook layouts and the other with craft projects. A third link goes to my photos on flickr.

Finally if English is not your first language, you can use the Google translate button. I've also added a search function by Lijit, so that if you're trying to find a particular post you can search for it there.

Looking Ahead

Over the next little while, I'll be working behind the scenes to finish up the layout. For example you may notice all my links to other blogs are gone. I plan to move those to a separate page and will soon add just one link for that.

For the next few months I will be slowly rolling out some standard weekly and monthly features. These will include freebies, tutorials and random things like the West Indian Word of the Week! In the meantime grab your favourite beverage and enjoy the soup!