(Alice back in 2007, when her baby J was so little and quiet!)

One of our group, Alice, is facing a difficult but exciting four years ahead of her. Alice has been accepted to study Occupational Therapy at the University of the Western Cape.

(J, now three, much less quiet and little, but just as lovely)

Once the initial shock of starting uni is over, we hope Alice will be able to come back to us part time. Alice is our Africa expert, ie she makes our Africas with each country in a different colour, not an easy task.

Alice, we’re so proud of you! Good luck at UWC.

Following on the success of the Jennifer’s Sea colour scheme, and inspired by the beautiful Plascon Colour Magazine, we thought we’d play a little more with reds. We started to combine them with indigos, to really quite pleasing results.

Plascon Colour Magazine

Now, if there’s one thing Beloved Beadwork definately is, it’s a company of strong, resilient women. So what better a name for a colour scheme that so resembles the colours of Liberia’s flag, than ‘Ode to Ellen’. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is Liberia’s, indeed Africa’s,  first modern female head of state. We hope to pay a small homage to her with our little colour scheme.

It’s hard to believe, but Design Indaba, that brilliant showcase of the best of South African design, is over.

Beloved Beadwork exhibited for the first time this year, and wow, what an event!

We met so many lovely and enthusiastic people, and so enjoyed the camaraderie amongst the exhibitors. So I just wanted to say a big ‘hello’ and ‘welcome’ to those of you finding our blog for the first time. Please keep watching for all our exciting news!

Fate keeps sending wonderful people my way, and at the moment, it seems to be particularly favouring those with mathematical information to share! No, not stocks and shares! Just knowledge of maths and how it could possibly apply to beadwork.

You see, something I’ve started to notice with beadwork is how often it mimics or replicates natural shapes or forms. So, for example, every other customer walks in, sees our rings and says ‘oooh, they look like sea anenomes’. It was that reaction that prompted us to name them ‘Ocean Floor’.

Left - photograph of a Nudibranch anenome by Jacques Devos (click image for his Flickr stream). Right - Ocean Floor rings.

Likewise, one of our lovely and knowledgeable customers pointed out that our Thousand Hills necklaces are remarkably similar to Girdled Lizards.

Left - Thousand Hills Necklace in elemental form. Right - A Girdled Lizard. This photo is all over the internet but I can't find the source. Anyone know?!

We also noticed the ability that certain mathematical sequences had to produce intensely nature-like shapes, such as the one-two-one-two sequence we use to make our flowers.

A fringed flower

Enter the lovely people who drift into my shop! I consider myself truly lucky for the customers and visitors who come here. So many are highly knowledgeable and skilled.

Mary, who was exhibiting her amazing mandalas at Montebello’s Art Box a few weeks ago, introduced me to the Institute for Figuring. They are dedicated to making mathematics more understandable and tangible by making crochet models of mathematical concepts. And it turns out, the one-two-one-two pattern I described which produces such a nature-like effect is used by these crocheters to make ‘hyperbolic planes’.

A 'Hyperbolic Plane' Click for the IFF Gallery

And the lovely Kechil, a fellow poetry lover, a wonderfully enthusiastic astronomer not to mention computer scientist, introduced me yesterday to Mandelbrot Fractals. She was followed by a customer who told me there had been the development of a near perfect three dimensional Mandelbrot structure. And today a customer mentioned Projective Geometry. I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited about maths before!

I can feel the possibilities, and I know something good is on it’s way. Luckily for me, I have two staff members with Economics degrees, and another with an Honours in Demographics, so I’m not alone in my love of maths. Right now at home, Estella is attempting a Hyperbolic Plane similar to this example from the IFF:

And Mado is attempting ‘flowers’ with different increase sequences. Now the challenge is Mandelbrot, that’s going to be interesting!

Myself (left) and Jeanne (right) at the Beloved Beadwork photoshoot at her apartment

Our beloved Jeanne flew home on Sunday night. There are few people who arrive in Cape Town from overseas and are able to make this place home with such ease and grace. An incredible friend to and a founding member of our group of wonder women by night, amazingly capable and intuitive activist-academic by day, Jeanne will be sorely missed by many as she makes her way home to New York. Not only an amazing personal friend, Jeanne was a wonderful supporter of Beloved Beadwork, whether by hosting our two-day photoshoot in her perfect-light apartment, climbing on top of our showroom to drill holes and fit ceilings, or placing well-timed orders to feed her Beloved Beadwork addiction, she has been vital to keeping us sane.

Bring on June. I can’t wait for you to be back here Jeanne.

Beloved Beadwork finally has it’s own shop sign! We are so excited, and feel so proud of our shop front.

It was made by the ever talented Right Mukore and his friend Wanda.

Right is a self-taught sculptor of note. His pieces often take my breath away, and his acclaim is growing world-wide as more and more people discover his talent. Right is also based at Montebello, just a stone’s throw from Beloved Beadwork.

We’re so pleased with our sign. Thanks Right!

…or, in English, teaching each other songs in our languages!

At Beloved Beadwork we are proudly, and I mean proudly Pan-African (and a token European, ie me!). I felt a real sense of pride in that philosophy today, when E came in and reported that she had taught the Xhosa song she learnt at work to her (largely Congolese) church, and they loved it.

She asked for more, and I found recordings from Freedom Is In Your Hand in my computer. My own journey to South Africa started with singing Xhosa choruses in an old church on a tiny Scottish island aged ten, and today I revelled in music’s ability to unite people.

A joyous day.

I think we must have posed quite a conundrum to the people driving by. ‘What could be making those two women look so wistful?’ they must have thought to themselves, as they saw our eyes drift into the middle distance, as we drifted along the road from Newlands to Claremont.

Laurence looking deep in thought!

Well ladies and gentlemen, much as we may proudly run a business based on principles of social justice and liberation, much as we like to discuss the important political stories of the day, much as we take our work very seriously… we were talking about breadmakers! That’s right. Laurence and I took a few moments out of our day of retail and wholesale, staff management issues and supply needs, decision making and plan drafting, to dream of one day owning a magic, breadmaking machine of our own.

Me looking a little bit blissed out!

If ever you needed proof that L and I are fundamentally, at heart, totally and utterly middle class, then here it is! When I first heard of breadmakers, it took me a while to wrap my head around the idea that such a small machine could make a loaf of bread from start to finish, and L hadn’t realised that this was the case until I explained my ideal kitchen appliance to her today. Laurence is a waffle maker of note (even her children’s teachers are jealous of their packed lunches!), and she was clearly making a mental list of recipes she’d try out.

Heaven

Anybody listening to the conversation might have thought it was absurd, but we were in heaven, imagining the smell of fresh bread greeting us and our families in the morning. I guess behind our graduate, multi-lingual, headstrong migrant, business-like exteriors, there’s a little bit of a housewife in all of us!

Have a good weekend everyone. I’ll be teaching an exciting little class at Beloved Beadwork tomorrow, taking B to a Hannah Montana themed birthday party, and enjoying a relaxed sunday in the garden.

Beloved Beadwork is a small, Cape Town-based company. We make beautiful pieces of hand-crafted jewellery using Japanese and Czech seed beads, and a huge variety of techniques. We aim to push the boundaries of beadwork, using the technique to produce textures and colour combinations which fascinate the eye.

Our studio is at the Montebello Design Centre in Newlands. We love our quiet, leafy surroundings there, and the lovely people we share the space with.

This blog will chart our progress, I hope, from small, start-up company, to a fully fledged, strong company, renouned for our design. (Well, that’s the idea anyway!)

Thanks for visiting, and please visit regularly.