Last week we let all our weavers know that this Thursday we were meeting at 9.00am in Main Road, Claremont, outside Ackermans. That's it. The big surprise was that we had arranged for everyone to see High School Musical 3 before our Mielie Thursday. The shop even remained closed for the morning so that Nolundi could also come.
With a bit of encouragement everyone made it up the escalators to the movie house, and, armed with ample coke and popcorn, we sat back and enjoyed ourselves. There was much cheering and clapping when our star of the show, the Two Daisy Mielie bag finally made her appearance! Imagine our delight when in a later scene Gabriella carried another Mielie bag - this time a Wave design in hot/hot colours.
The prize for the best dressed Mielie Peep of the day most certainly goes to Sheila in her powder blue baby doll outfit.
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Meet Nonqubela,who sews up Mielie bags when she's not running a little mobile chicken feet snackshop in Khayelitsha. Her secret for the most awesome walkies ever? Aromat, of course!
Regarding the recipe topic of yesterday - that's more like it! Thanks to Caroline, Anke, Marina & Molly for asking so nicely for the recipe. I just needed to be sure that I wasn't wasting my breath... or my fingers and keyboard on typing out those recipes.
Golden pear Tart
This classic pear tart is baked with ground almond topping until golden-brown.
For the pastry:
75g (3 oz/6tbsp) caster sugar
150g (5 oz/half a cup plus 2 tbsp) butter
225g (8 oz/2 cups) plain flour, sifted
For the filling
100g (4 oz/half cup) butter
100g (4 oz/half cup) granulated sugar
2 eggs
25g (1 oz/quarter cup) flour
150g (5 oz/one-and-a-quarter cup) ground almonds
5ml (1tsp) vanilla extract
4 ripe firm pears, peeled, cored & sliced
30ml apricot jam, warmed
To make the pastry:
Preheat the oven to 170°C (325°F/gas mark 3)
Melt the butter and stir the sugar into it over a gentle heat until dissolved.
Stir in the sifted flour and work to a smooth dough.
Chill.
Press the pastry into a 25cm (10 inch)flan tin, prick the base with a fork & cover with foil.
Weight down the pastry with dried beans.
Bake for 15 minutes.
Remove the beans and foil.
To make the filling:
Turn the oven up to 220°C (425°F/mark7)
Beat the butter, sugar, eggs, flour, ground almonds and vanilla together.
Spread this over the pastry.
Arrange the sliced pears in a beautiful pattern... or picture? over the top and brush with warmed apricot jam.
Bake for 15-20 minutes or until set and golden brown.
Serve at room temperature.
YUM!
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I made Golden Pear Tart out of my Alfresco recipe book this weekend. It's made with ground almonds, and it's delicious. If you want the recipe, I'll need at least two requests in the comments field. The reason is that I'm not sure if anyone is enjoying my recipes. So if you want 'em - beg me!
I quickly diverted these pretty bags that are on their way to Germany to snap them for you. Lucky Germans, I say!
Oh, and I found this beautiful picture of Mboto with her little son. Mbotho wove the beautiful Herringbone bag design last week, remember?
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Remember the designs of the new collection that came in last week? I was a bit disappointed when bag 1 and bag 2 came in last week. They were supposed to sport the Herringbone design but I felt they looked too similar to the Wave design. I decided to give it one more week, and was pleased with bag 3 and delighted with bag 4. I am so excited about the fact that the three-dimensionality comes through so well. It was woven by Mboto, pictured below with her daughter at our Christmas party last year. Earlier this year she also gave birth to a beautiful boy.
Thanks and well done, Mboto!
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Growing up in Cape Town, we didn't really know about Hallowe'en, but Hollywood seems to have fixed all of that, and today there is great anticipation for tomorrow's dress-up and trick-or-treating.
Deon and I recently went walking on some Constantia wine farms and discovered two very different monuments to the memory of those no longer with us, five minutes walk from each other.
The first was the neatly limewashed walled graveyard of the Cloete family, who must have owned the land a couple of centuries back. Some of the tombstones date back to the late 1700's.
The second was the Islam Hill Kramat, a burial site of a long departed Imam, or spiritual leader. There are several of these spiritual sites dotted around Cape Town and they are regularly visited by our local Muslim community.
A Constantia wine farmer once told me that in the days when slavery was legal at the Cape, it was not permitted to own a Christian slave. For this reason, wealthy land- and slave-owners actually sponsored Imams to come to the Cape from the East Indies to ensure that their slaves kept their Islamic faith. Perhaps this chilling fact has contributed the vibrant role that the Muslim culture and faith play in life in Cape Town today.
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Yikes, it's been a crazy week/month. Without boring you with too much detail, we've been:
- developing a couple of brand new products and designing a new collection (way too late in the year - what were we thinking?)
- finalising the design of our new website - out next month
- spending a lot of time focusing on business matters - agreements, projections and other mind-bogglers
- oh, and did I mention getting out all our Christmas orders in between?
I saw this chair, happily chilling under a multilingual "No dumping" sign. It make me think that every now and then you need to just STOP and take a a deep breath, in a field, on a chair - wherever. Altogether now, deep breath in... and out. Better?
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Today was completely overshadowed by the pain caused by stupidly slamming my finger in the door. So to distract myself I thought I'd show you some inspiring pics...
I found these beautiful photos on showstudio. They were taken by fashion photographer Sølve Sundsbø. The parrots really do look like models strutting their stuff and showing off their fine feathers, don't you think?
Meet Chris, a Dutch legal student who is doing an internship at my husband, Deon's office. Chris and a couple of his friends came to visit us at Mielie. His t-shirt has a real tie stitched onto it... cool or what?
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This is a sneak preview of our new simple - but methinks beautiful - laptop bag. It needs some tweaking, but we're pretty chuffed with it (chuffed: safafrican for pleased). My thanks to Elna for helping me to channel this vague idea into something tangible. Elna is working on her Masters degree focussing on environmentally sustainable product development and approached me a while back to collaborate on some new Mielie products. The laptop bag is the first, but there will be more follow.
... and this is me with the rest-of-the-week team, minus Mzo, who was sick today. Our weavers meet on Thursdays, and this team comes in every other day of the week to sew up and finish the bags. Ideas magazine interviewed me for an article about entrepreneurs and came to take photos - with make-up artist et al. In front (l-r): Phumla, Marina & Nolundi. Middle: Nonqubela, Sheila & Nosithembele. Back: Mawethu, Malibongwe, Thaka and moi. Don't we look pretty?
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I sketched these flipflops from a holiday photo and today Morgan interpreted them in his embroidery medium. I like. But the prize for the wackiest flipflops go to Nomthunzi, who arrived at Mielie sporting these beauties yesterday!
Living on the side of the mountain brings a lot of floral inspiration, and the odd bit of fauna that inspires new products. Like this baby puffadder we found in our garden yesterday morning! Made me think of the Majola snake we made a while ago. I was recently asked to make another one, and I think this photo of puffy might just come in handy.
Have a great weekend everyone!
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The sketches on the left are what I gave the Mielie weavers last week... and on the photos on the is what they did with them! The inspiration for this collection is A Midsummer eve garden party. Think patio parties with glam evening gowns in strong designs. Up hairstyles, big earrings, eyelashes. Very Liz Taylor in the 70's.
Some of them worked better than others and we've still got a lot of work ahead of us, but all in all I'm very happy. Thanks ladies.
Oh and do yourself a favour and read Heather's hilarious account of the how the new mini Skinny shop came to be.
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