Notebook

Mogalakwena's hand embroidered table linen adorns many tables at family gatherings, intimate dinners, celebrations and festivities.

The joy of special meals around a beautifully set table always lingers...

Enhance your own tablescape with Mogalakwena's hand embroidered table linen ...aquamarine and turquoise for a seaside al fresco, oystercatchers and penguins in black and white for a more formal table setting or shwe shwe for a quintessential South African breakfast.

These hand embroidered linens add style to your table, bring joy to your guests and employment to skillful hands working in a deep rural craft studio.

Visit our gallery/shop in the old stables at Montebello Craft & Design Centre.

Almost 20 years in the Mogalakwena permanent collection, the hand embroidered panel depicting the Craft Art Village is on its way to a new collection in the UK.

From top left to bottom right:

The Artist's Retreat

The Writer's Cottage

Craft Art Studio

Fever Tree Cottage

Nature's slower rhythm allows us to pause, nurture, restore, and find time to enjoy small comforts...

• reflect on the words of William Henry Channing

To live content with small means.

To seek elegance rather than luxury,
and refinement rather than fashion.

To be worthy not respectable,
and wealthy not rich.

To study hard, think quietly, talk gently,
act frankly, to listen to stars, birds, babes,
and sages with open heart, to bear all
cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, 
hurry never.

In a word, to let the spiritual,
unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the common.

This is to be my symphony.

• the cosiness of a hand knitted woollen beanie, pullover or scarf

         Knitted by 98 year old Gogo Hilda Phiri

• the sense of well-being  afforded by rose-scented hand stitched hearts
• hand knitted tea cosies.

The above are available in our shop.

Crisp, cold days and autumn leaves prompt us to prepare for winter.

Unpack warm woollen garments and prepare comfort food ... hearty casseroles, homemade soups and freshly baked bread.

Whether setting the table or creating a cosy couch, include the warm colours of autumn...yellow, orange, rust, copper and brown.

Vincent van Gogh aptly wrote; "As long as autumn lasts I shall not have hands, canvas and colours enough to paint the beautiful things I see."

...the time of the year in the southern hemisphere when animals, people and plants prepare for winter.

Garden visitors heed to their autumn survival instincts; tortoises build sufficient reserves, squirrels store nuts, berries and acorns, bees slow down, and hedgehogs find burrows.

... a time to ground oneself in time and place with needle, fabric and threads.