Wise Craft

komforte chockolates

All summer, this house has been working on a seed of an idea that is finally ready to show its face in the big world. I am so excited to tell you about it!

(I have chills typing this!) After numerous conceptual meetings, decision making, midnight a-ha! moments, and, of course, lots of chocolate testing, I am so excited to introduce to you a line of chocolate bars designed and created by my husband Peter and his partners Frank and Robert. Komforte Chockolates.

I know! This is coming out of left field, right? Wait! A chocolate bar? What?

Komforte Chockolates (pronounced just like 'comfort chocolates') began as a casual idea among friends earlier this year. As a brand consultant, Peter has had the opportunity to create and craft brand images for many people and companies, but I think the desire has always been there to produce his own brand. Creating a brand of chocolate came about because we had access to knowledgeable folks within the chocolate industry. Peter collaborated with Seattle Chocolates, a leader in the industry, and his idea grew with their knowledge and expertise. They believed in the concept and jumped in to help develop the product.

So, what is Komforte Chockolates?

The idea is simple. Peter believes in all-American comfort food. Food that is familiar, that feels like home, that's full of flavor, and that tastes good. Komforte Chockolates does not come from an elite palate, but rather, one that finds familiarity in good food. Mixing amazing chocolate with everyday, flavorful comfort food was the goal. Sweet and savory is nothing new in chocolate (chocolate and bacon comes to mind), but Peter's idea was coming from a different. Our summer months were spent mixing recipes (both at Seattle Chocolates kitchens and here in our own kitchen). Deciding to focus on three great combinations was the easy part. Getting those combinations just right took many months, but we are so happy to be finally there.

Our first three flavors are:

 

French Toast- premium milk chocolate mixed with bits of crunchy, savory french toast. A hint of cinnamon. Just like mom used to make.

 

Tortilla with Lime & Salt- Milk chocolate mixed with lime infused tortilla chips. All of our favorite flavors in one bar...

But then, we were absolutely stumped on the third bar. Nothing was coming together quite right and we were running through the list of possibilities, having no luck.

And then, one night at dinner, we were talking to the kids about our dilemma.

Emma had a random thought...

"Dad, what about ramen noodle?"

Blank stares across the table.

Suddenly, we had our third flavor.

 

Emma's favorite food of all time, Ramen Noodle (now you know the truth about mealtime around here), became the third combination. (My favorite combination actually.) Crunchy ramen noodles mixed with rich dark chocolate. Consider it sort of the next evolution of your childhood nestle crunch bar. (Check out Emma's hidden "ERS" initials on the bar's label. She's very proud of that.) Seriously good.

 

The packaging of these bars is intentionally clean and unadorned. 

Why the weird spelling? Well, if you've ever tried to trademark a generic word like "chocolate" you'll be nodding your head right now. So, Peter got creative.

Where can you get it? Its slowly making its way out into the world. If you're in Seattle, you can find it on the amazonfresh home grocery delivery website. They are also available on the main amazon website, but as of yet only by the sleeve (12 bars per sleeve). They will soon be available at Uwajimaya (we will be doing a sampling demo there soon, I will let you know when). We are excited to now be available in Portland at The Meadow. For right now, our website is mainly for wholesale orders, but if you are interested in wholesale, please email us at sales@komfortechockolates.com. All up to date news can be found on our facebook page (there is a fan box in my upper left sidebar).

**Right now, I've got 2 sets (1 of each of the bars in a set) available to give away. Please leave us a comment on this post, check us out on our facebook page, and tell us what your ideal Komforte Chockolate flavor combination would be (we have a list, but would love to hear from you too). Thank you!

Update: The winners have been chosen, thank you to everyone!

more patchwork

 

Another patchwork product. Are you tired of these? This time done in a long (28") rectangular pillow. Some accuse me of churning these patchwork things out. I assure you I'm not, it just looks that way, thanks to the magic of blogs. I'm really loving the way little bits of color and pattern come to life when combined this way. The length of the pillow inspired the patterning of the blocks (seen best in the 2nd photo). I didn't think too much about the fabric placement beyond making a stack of pale colors and one of more saturated colors. That's another thing I love about patchwork. You can get crazy specific on it, or just start piecing and see what happens.

We have so so much going on around here, our life is feeling kind of pieced and patchworky. The kids are enjoying the last bit of summer...Peter is preparing the launch of something very exciting and I can't wait to tell you about it (when he'll let me, soon)...and I am soon to be starting a new job, back in the fashion industry, after 11 years. I'm nervous and thrilled! Which means I have to buy some new clothes. I think that anything black (without stains) will work nicely to start with. I'm inspired to make myself a plain black smock/tunic (to wear over  jeans) and do a flower collar on it. Do you guys know of any good basic tunic patterns?

resuming

This is the latest quilt to cross my studio worktable, the Denyse Schmidt "Single Girl" quilt I'm making for Emma's bed. I actually finished the quilt top before the Christmas flurry started, and put it away till the new year to work on other things. I'm really happy to pull it out again and refocus.

I started this quilt promising myself I would not buy any printed fabrics to do the piecing with, they would all come from my stash. Which they did. At the time, my fabric shelves were so full, I really didn't see many of these prints until I took everything out and put it all back, piece by piece. In the end, as I suspected, I had to choose between too many prints. There are 35 prints called for, and I gave very little thought as to how the patterns I did choose would work with each other. As for Emma, her only request was that there be lots of light blue and I figured, even for a 10 year old girl that color would never really fall out of favor. I chose a neutral background, a white with a very slight touch of gray. (I believe its Kona Cotton 'Natural'.)

I am really happy with how this has turned out so far. Those who have read this blog for any length of time may remember that I have already made a quilt for Emma's bed. That one is on her bed now, and has been used daily since I made it. Truth is, when a girl likes to make quilts, and she runs out of beds to make them for, she starts all over again. I guess that's what I'm doing. I will put a loftier batting inside (dream cotton), and will use flannel for the backing. It will be heavier than the 'simple' quilt, so we can switch them out seasonally.

The next step is quilting it and this time, I am planning to have it professionally done. I have juggled with going this route with every quilt I've ever made but always ended up doing the quilting myself to save money and to prove to myself I could do it. This time I've got so many other things going on that I thought I would just give the idea a try. It will be a relief to only have to concentrate on the binding, that's always sort of a cathartic process for me.

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Thanks for all the wonderful comments and kind words about Peter's art. You are such a wonderfully supportive bunch. I am still trying to get more pictures of my piece, but in the meantime here's the one he made for his parents. The man's got skills.

I have a giveaway planned here on Thursday, so please check in.

Soon!

ease

to ease : to become less active, intense, or severe.

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As I have been easing the curved seams of the quilt together over the past few days, I have been thinking of the word ease and what an appropriate metaphor for our life presently. We are easing towards the end of summer, easing into earlier bedtimes, easing toward the start of school next Wednesday.

The start of school is always bittersweet. I know I will miss carefree summer days of kids around the house all day (well, the days that they actually got along), but with the start of school comes much more structure for everyone, which is probably good for everyone in the house. There will be much more time for me to devote work (our company is one year old!), and I'm hoping a full thought can actually form in my head without a thousand interruptions.

Forgive my fewer posts as we ease into a new routine.
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Peter and I have been married 14 years today. For those who haven't heard how we met, the short version is we met at work, and fell in love over lots of coffee, all day breakfast diners, Matthew Sweet, Lloyd Cole, and the X Files. Because of this man, I have an extremely happy and contented life. I don't know what I did to deserve him, but I am truly happy I did it.

tuesday's mosaic

This is a project that Peter and I worked on most of the day Tuesday for a client (this would be the fun part of a small business in our world).  We did the mosaic patterning on the flowers, what do you think?  Its made from bottle caps!  See-

The client we did this for was inspired by Barney's holiday windows, so the idea began there and developed into this.  The print on the panels are from a small swatch of fabric, blown up.

The panels will ship to Barcelona tomorrow.

Bye bye pretty panels...

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Thank you for your encouraging words on the eightbyeight project!  It means so much to us!

stop to consider

This is a picture Peter (blue shirt) and others standing in front of a store in Tokyo, one that he helped design a few years ago.

I have been married to that man 13 years today.

I will spare you any of the ghastly photos from our wedding.  There was only one good one, taken by a friend at the reception, I swear the rest were pretty awful.  (If only we could get married again, my wedding would really be great this time, I swear.)  Miraculously after all these years, we are still smiling at each other.  Our life together is full of all kinds of changes at the moment.  Good changes, but hard work getting there. 

Happy Anniversary Peter, I love you so.  Neither us are very easy to live with, so its lucky we found each other, right?

Dare I say that I fall into the category of misery loves company on the subject of the way we feel about the subject of taking pictures of ourselves.  You guys hate it as much as I do!  I fear an entire generation of children will grow up thinking their moms were not really there, just a figment of their large, youthful imaginations.  Thanks for the comiserating.  I'm really thinking we should all grab our camera today and take a picture with our children, looking exactly as we look to them each day.  I feel the sudden pressing need to preserve myself for them.

I promise I still sew, that I will draw those names, and that there will be a shop update as promised.  I'm feeling very inspired by the Fall feeling air in the evenings right now.  Only there have been full plates for us here right now.  I am getting a hard and fast lesson on how to organize my time to be the most productive.  Bear with me, friends.

Am I rambling?  ...I'm rambling...

track groupies

It's officially track season for us...this is the Marymoore Velodrome.

Well, Peter's doing the racing, we'll be doing the cheering (in green and black)-

it may be Spring, but its freezing cold out here...and you do realize that track bikes have no brakes, don't you?

a mini-celebrity "meet and greet" in the stands-

and we've recently learned that all fans cheer louder with big chocolate chip cookies and hot chocolates in their hand, so we're righting that grave oversight.

How did you guys feel about the end of Lost last night?  Am I a complete sap for just wishing Kate and Jack would have ended up together?  And also, I want to know more about the french woman and Ben, how did she get pregnant and have her daughter while on the island?  Fill me in if I'm missing something.

eye candy for boys who like bikes

These prints were a gift to Peter from his photographer friend Nick Clements.  I surprised Peter by hanging them up in the family room over the weekend.  This may not seem all that big, but I get really stressed hanging photos up evenly people!  Do they look straight?

I love how old school these photos are, those goggles kill me.  I may have mentioned this before, but Peter collects vintage cycling jerseys.  We found his all-time favorite ones in London about 12 years ago.

Back to sewing, have a great Tuesday!

 

what i love~wednesday

Peter's gift today (doesn't every man need a pillow on Valentine's Day?).  From Marie Claire Idees (Sept 2006).  The grayish blue linen was thrifted from last summer, embroidered in a coral-y red, and I used a form from an IKEA pillow that we grew tired of long ago.  See it up close here.

googly-eyed gnome kisses with little felt hats that my kids made for their classmates, from here.

and the valentine flowers that some little wise craft elves secretly planted for me in my window boxes yesterday-

Have a happy hearts day, however you like to celebrate it.  xo

just a bit

This blog is always such a good reminder to stop and notice the otherwise unnoticed around me.  This little corner is in my bedroom, on the wall nearest my side of the bed.  The large butterfly piece is from my mother, it was on display at some time or another in my childhood home.  The longer horizontal ones above it are a few years old from Anthropologie.  This room is still beige, but lately I've started fixating on changing the color to a gray shade, thanks to a suggestion from Alicia, and this plate-

By Denby, I found a set of 6 pieces at a thrift store a few weeks ago.  I love the color, love the rim color.  I'm realizing that in this photo is doesn't look much different than the color the wall is now, but it is just different enough in person.  I think its perfect, now must convince Peter, he's thinking in a different direction.

Speaking of Peter, cruising around Flickr this morning I found a picture of him racing his bike!  He is 2nd place in the photo, bright green and black unitard.

Some of you asked about Emma's room, did it ever get painted?  Well, the answer is not yet.  She picked a color she like from the swatches she taped to her wall, then I was in the mood one day to show her some much zanier, more saturated blues and aqua shades to choose from and the discussion widened.  We are all non-committal at this point, but we'll get around to deciding, we always do.

Thank you guys for your comments on the Hettie and Esse quilt.  I haven't much time to respond individually to your comments this week, but know that I loved hearing your thoughts.  Always do.