The gift of hijab: Fashion designer found empowerment in modesty

As a Muslim woman living in Canada, Hafsa Altaf faced countless challenges on multiple fronts when navigating the fashion industry as a woman in a hijab.

Rejected by local trade shows and craft markets and criticized by detractors in the South Asian community who disapproved of her sartorial ambitions, the 27-year-old artist and designer remained undaunted.

Undeterred by naysayers, she relentlessly called and emailed event organizers, determined to convey the values and mission of her label, Fashion by Hafsa.

Facing down the conservatism of her community was an altogether different struggle, but it was also one of the “greatest things” she has ever done, says the Pakistani-born Canadian, who moved to Saskatchewan with her family when she was four.

Husband-and-wife food bloggers show how two chefs can navigate the home kitchen and stay happy

NEW YORK (AP) — Husband-and-wife food bloggers and podcasters Sonja and Alex Overhiser have a new cookbook that uses a simple step to keep the kitchen a less heated place for two chefs: clear, alternating roles.

“A Couple Cooks: 100 Recipes to Cook Together” lays out ingredients and directions for a wide array of dishes, like any other cookbook, but also divides the cooking tasks — one home chef is designated a square, the other a triangle — so neither is overwhelmed or resentful.

“Everything is more fun together, we think. And so we found that about cooking,” says Sonja Overhiser from their home in Indianapolis. “You’ll stay doing it if you’re doing it with someone else.”

So to make their Meatballs with Fire-Roasted Marinara, one chef preheats the oven and then starts to make the marinara sauce, while the other prepares the meatballs. They come together at the end to coat the cooked meatballs with the sauce and add Parmesan cheese and basil.

New Jenna Rae cookbook focuses on bakers’ favourite home recipes

There’s a sweet new edition on the way.

Sisters Jenna Hutchinson and Ashley Kosowan are expanding their successful local bakery business with a new cookbook venture. Jenna Rae Cakes at Home: Our Favourite Recipes to Enjoy with Family and Friends hits bookstores Oct. 8 and features more than 100 colourful, family-friendly recipes.

The cookbook is a followup to their first release, Jenna Rae Cakes and Sweet Treats, and is a labour of love that brings together the twins’ individual interests.

“Ash was meant to make cookbooks,” says Hutchinson, whose passion for cake design prompted the entrepreneurial siblings to open their first Jenna Rae Cakes shop in 2014.

Almond Nail Bar digs into expansion mode

Winnipeg’s newest export is packing its polish.

The first out-of-province Almond Nail Bar has quietly opened in Burnaby, B.C. Chinh La, the franchise owner, is preparing for a big unveiling in September.

His shop’s opening will be followed by one in Ontario and two more in British Columbia. Back in Manitoba, locations in Niverville and Steinbach are brewing.

In Winnipeg — where La and his wife own two locations — things are “very busy.”

Pride and passion stitched right in

Surrounded by vibrant textiles, Oluwayemisi Josephine Ogunwale, or Yemz, as she likes to be referred to, sits at her sewing machine, brow furrowed in concentration as she stitches the hem of a dress.

The tools of her trade within easy reach — fabric scissors, measuring tapes, cottons of various shades — Ogunwale is in her happy place: creating beautiful and wearable works of art for her loyal clientele.

The dressmaker has always been interested in fashion. As a child she would sew doll clothing from scraps of material her mother discarded. This progressed to altering her own clothes: modifying hems, adjusting frills, loosening or tightening waistlines.

“Sometimes I would destroy the clothes because of how many changes I made to it,” she laughs.

Time to replace your car? How to tell when repair bills are no longer worth it

TORONTO - Deciding whether to fix your aging car again or trade it in for a new one can be a tough calculation at the best of times, let alone when financing costs have significantly jumped and car prices have soared.

Whether to repair or replace your car comes down to balancing the cost and utility of the vehicle, according to Ben Mayhew, a financial planner and founder of Aergo Financial Planning in Halifax.

"But when you're in an environment where used car prices and new car prices are significantly higher, we need to go deeper on looking at that balance," he said.

He suggested finding a trustworthy mechanic who can help determine if an expensive repair could help defer acar purchase.

Raising up books as social justice tools

Valerie Chelangat spends her days reading. She reads every day, mostly in the morning, sometimes before bed in the evenings and, if she has time to spare, in the hours between.

Leaving auto repair life in the rear-view

For decades, Cadillacs, Mustangs and Audis have overnighted in the Exchange District for repairs and transformations.

Now, a Winnipeg mechanic envisions a new use for his shop — one that sees it filled with milk and produce instead of wrenches and tires.

“There’s no groceries down here,” said Andy Baranowski, owner of J.W. McDonald Auto Service. “Where are you going to get your milk?”

The 189 Bannatyne Ave. building has been an auto repair garage for almost a century — since 1923, according to the Manitoba Historical Society.

Raber Gloves’ Garbage Mitts the must-have Winnipeg winter accessory

‘I am the wrong person to complain to about the weather,” Howard Raber says jubilantly midway through a Winnipeg January, wearing a golf shirt as he opens the door to his family’s factory on McDermot Avenue.

Raber does not mind the cold. It’s the reason he is in business.

Had his grandparents immigrated in 1925 to a warmer place, their grandson’s opinion on the windchill might differ. But the ancestors chose Winnipeg — not such a bad place to be in the business of making gloves.

When it’s freezing outside, which in the wintertime is often, if not always, Howard Raber considers himself especially lucky. “When it’s cold out, we are everybody’s best friend.”

City company set to expand online tutoring presence after raising large equity stake

Winnipeg education technology company Hoot Reading has landed one of the first investments in a new venture capital fund from toy maker Spin Master.

Interest in Hoot Reading, which has developed an online tutoring platform whose mission is closing the gap in what’s been identified as a reading slump in the fourth grade, has grown significantly through the pandemic.

With school-age children home in various parts of North America at various times during the pandemic, parents have been forced to look for more tools to help with early childhood educational habits and Hoot Reading has caught on.

“We have had incredible traction during the pandemic,” said Maya Kotecha, co-founder and co-CEO of Hoot Reading. “It has been a tailwind for us.”

Fort Garry toy library builds community, breaks down barriers

For Ian Scott and Landon Gibson, it’s always a good time to try to make a difference.

The Fort Garry couple are the founders and co-ordinators of the Red River Toy Library. Located in the basement of Fort Garry United Church at 800 Point Rd. and open every Saturday morning from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m., the library lends toys to young families, free of charge.

Scott and Gibson were inspired to start the initiative after a fall 2019 visit with friends in Saskatoon who volunteer at a toy library.

They started putting together a proposal for the toy library during the COVID-19 lockdown in spring last year.

For a quarter-century, McNally Robinson's Grant Park location has tapped into local book lover's desires

Twenty-five years ago this week, the staff of McNally Robinson were frantically preparing, bounding about their Grant Park store, a 20,000-square-foot behemoth that had yet to welcome its first customer.

The grand opening was near, and so was Margaret Atwood.

Atwood, if not the country’s most famous author then at least its second or third, was in Winnipeg to promote her latest book, Alias Grace, and to lend her authoritative support to what was to become the country’s largest independent bookstore, with a reading and book signing. A large crowd was anticipated.

There was a wild push to get ready for Oct. 15: staff were shifted from the company’s smaller locations, shipments were arriving in rapid succession. Shelves still had to be set up when Atwood arrived a few hours early to discuss the details of her reading, where she would be joined by a local literary icon, Carol Shields.

City’s oldest halal shop a community cornerstone

To step into Manitoba’s longest-running halal store is to feel all your senses go off at once.

Colourful spices lining the shelves, hookahs of every size and variety, signage above each aisle in English and Arabic, the smell of warm samosas. On a small television a video of Muslim worshippers in Mecca with prayers overlaid plays, above one of the store’s tightly-packed lanes.

At the heart of it all, 70-year-old owner Yusuf Abdulrehman is somehow the most vibrant aspect of the store.

Seemingly unable to stop moving, he paces through the aisles of the Halal Meat Centre, located at 206 Maryland St., fixing products just so, talking to suppliers on speaker phone, but always stopping to greet customers, many he knows by name. It’s no wonder that many in Winnipeg’s Muslim community fondly refer to the store as simply “Yusuf’s.”

Bright orange safety shirts now beacon of hope, thanks to young designer

Isaiah Binns, who graduated last spring from Elmwood High School, arrives at the downtown headquarters of Richlu Industries, the manufacturer of Tough Duck workwear, to see the logo he helped create for a line of the company’s reflective safety clothing ahead of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

Custom-crafted dog kennels more plush than penal

SELKIRK — One of late, standup comedian George Carlin’s best-loved shticks revolved around how, as a kid, his parents would command him to his bedroom for hours on end whenever he misbehaved. That never seemed like much of a punishment, he’d explain in his trademark, wry tone, given that’s where all his “stuff” was, the punch line being if his mom and dad really wanted to teach him a lesson, they would have banished him to their room, instead.

Carlin’s bit came to mind recently during an interview with Matt and Kaelyn Proutt, owners of M+K Wood Co., a Selkirk-based enterprise that turns out hand-crafted, wooden dog kennels that, at first glance, could easily be mistaken for a fashionable end table or armoire.

Three years ago, the married couple brought home Callie, a Labrador-English bulldog mix. They purchased a conventional, wire crate during her puppy phase, which they placed her inside as a form of discipline if she nabbed something from a dinner plate or destroyed a throw pillow. Except after they replaced her metal lair with one Matt fashioned out of spruce wood, which Kaelyn subsequently stained to match their living room decor, they discovered it no longer served its intended, penal purpose.

“Originally, the kennel was for when she was naughty. But because she seemed to enjoy the new one so much, we had to start leaving the door open all the time, so she could go inside whenever she felt like it,” Kaelyn says with a chuckle, seated next to Matt on a couch steps away from their pooch’s hideaway.

Local jewelry company handed key to success

It’s a golden opportunity that came straight out of the blue.

Nominees for the upcoming Emmy and Golden Globe awards will be walking the red carpet in handmade necklaces from Winnipeg company Jillian Leigh Jewelry, but exactly how the award show organizers discovered the local brand of gold adornments remains a mystery.

“We still don’t know how they found us, but we’re really glad they did,” says co-founder and jeweler Velia Amador. “It means a lot to us to be able to participate in such a high profile event because it’s going to help us gain some international exposure.”

“And if any of the celebrities loved our pieces and ordered something from us, I think I would die,” says Jillian Sheedy, the business’s other half and a self-professed celebrity enthusiast. Before they were business partners, the women were co-workers at a corporate office. They started Jillian Leigh together in 2018 after Amador — who had been forging jewelry as a hobby for more than a decade — offered to make some custom bracelets for Sheedy’s wedding.

New resto taps into Korean cuisine to amp up the humble 'corn' dog

Imagine a world full of corn dogs.

Think innumerable personal configurations — scores of sauces and seasonings, not to mention the variety of meats and cheeses that can be found inside these deliciously crispy concoctions.

Could it be the classic pairings of ketchup and mustard or the adventurous sweet mayo, teriyaki and honey butter? Is the batter just panko-crusted, or does it have potatoes on it? Perhaps it’s infused with squid ink?

Maybe on the inside, there’s a long pull of mozzarella cheese, with the choice of chicken, veggie, pork or beef for the meat. Perhaps, however, you want to scrap the sausage altogether and just go with oozing chocolate instead.

Iconic Churchill Tundra Buggy goes electric

The Churchill travel company, Frontiers North Adventure, has been operating its fleet of iconic Tundra Buggies for decades but for various reasons John Gunter, CEO of the company, knew the fleet needed to be upgraded.

A chance encounter between Gunter and Red River College’s former head of research and partnerships three years ago put Gunter on the path towards electrifying the Tundra Buggies.

On Tuesday, the fruits of that labour were revealed at Red River College’s Vehicle Technology and Energy Centre (VTEC) — the first EV (electric vehicle) Tundra Buggy.

It was a collaborative effort between Frontiers North, RRC’s VTEC, New Flyer and the non-profit Vehicle Technology Centre that pooled a growing expertise in heavy vehicle electrification that has been developing over the past decade in Winnipeg.

Veggie Van to bring fresh produce to inner city residents

A farmer’s market on wheels is hoping to put a dent into the problem of food deserts in Winnipeg’s inner city

Fireweed Food Co-op has launched its new Veggie Van pilot program, which brings subsidized local produce into Winnipeg’s inner city neighbourhoods through a mobile market on Thursday afternoons. The West Central Women’s Resource Centre was the first stop on the Veggie Van’s inaugural tour last week.

“We have zucchini, beets, yellow onion, carrots, sweet corn,” says Fireweed’s food hub delivery co-ordinator Janelle Wride, while standing behind a table piled high with colourful vegetables. “Those are most of the basic items that we have available from the producers right now and each week it’ll change a little bit.”

The goal of the program, she says, is to combat food insecurity by offering cheap, nutritious produce for sale in underserved communities.

Black History Manitoba's block party opportunity for chefs to share their passion

As a little girl growing up in Jamaica, Patrice Gilman dreamed that one day, she would cook just like Gladys, her grandmother. Everyone around downtown Kingston knew Gladys, and the little restaurant she owned in the area called Southside. Her dish of tripe and beans was famous, and fed famous athletes and hungry kids alike.

Gilman was fascinated by watching her grandmother manage the little kitchen, cooking all on her own, darting between pots of goat or chicken or fish bubbling on any of a dozen wood-fired stoves. Every morning, Gladys rose before the sun to start making lunch, and every day she was sold out of food not long after noon.

Still, she always had a little something for the kids who hung around, the ones who didn’t have enough.

“She was a one-woman show,” Gilman says. “She would feed the whole community. She had nine children, and raised many more children that weren’t her own. She passed away about 13 years ago, but her spirit lives on so strongly in our family’s heart.”

Chef wants to keep on trucking while she puts down permanent restaurant roots

Tara Hall is just getting started.

The 40-year-old chef is the owner of Winnipeg’s Aboriginal Fusion food truck and she has her sights set on opening a restaurant — sans wheels — focused on the foods she grew up eating.

The elevator pitch is “traditional Aboriginal foods with a fine-dining twist,” Hall says. “We don’t have enough of that here.”

She was born in Vancouver and grew up with her great-grandparents and grandpa on Pinaymootang First Nation in the Interlake. Hall watched her elders and aunties closely in the kitchen and learned to make staples, such as bannock, fried pickerel and saskatoon berry jam, at a young age.

Winnipeg esthetician Tina Cable knows sometimes beauty can be skin-deep

There is nothing quite like the rush of seeing an email from Tina Cable of Myuz Artistry with the subject line “cancellation.”

As one of Winnipeg’s most in-demand skin-care gurus, Cable can be a hard lady to get some face time with. Any available appointments with her for facials, skin consults or facial sculpting are booked almost immediately after she opens her schedule.

And those cancellation emails? You’d better hope you just happened to be checking your inbox when the note arrived, because those spots disappear quickly, too.

Those lucky enough to get in to see Cable know what the hype is about. When it comes to skin care, she has a wealth of information about a volume of products so enormous it can be overwhelming at best and crippling at worst.