The Kitchen....and what it's for

Or....The Stove and how to use it

MFB and I work in a university town so when I say there are a few pizza places I'm sure you know that's an understatement. Even so, we decided to be adventurous and picked up a "It's Not Delivery" pizza on Friday as we knew we would be painting (yes still painting and it's trim...lots and lots of trim...we will never be finished with the pa - uh sorry) over the weekend and would want something easy to prepare.

So late Saturday afternoon we're debating over do we want the crispy crust (place directly on rack) or regular crust (place on cookie sheet). I love crispy crust and the oven is self cleaning so I say put it on the rack. We set the timer on the oven and go put our feet up and admire our progress in the Decade of Painting Dangerously. Before the timer goes off I remark "gee it smells like pizza" MFB say's "it smells like burning pizza". It's probably dripping on the oven element so no panic but we go right into the kitchen and open the oven. We get a face of smoke from the sauce and cheese on the element but the pizza itself is close to being burned. HUHHHH?? We wonder. MFB shuts the oven door while we grab the cookie sheet and a spatula and we open the oven door to get the pizza out and close the oven door again. Each time we open the oven door the convection fan turns off and when we close it the ... I'm sure the look on our faces was priceless when that registered. It's hard to eat nearly burned pizza when you're laughing at yourselves but we managed. BTW it's not half bad pizza.

On to some knitting news. In between painting myself the trim, watching the grass grow uncontrollably due to the rain over the last couple of weekends, and burning pizza I finished my first Feather and Fan Sock, sorry no picture yet and finishing one Fetching. I made this using a cable needle free cable technique that Ava suggested I check out. I think I was the guinea pig here. I didn't have too much trouble with it, the worst part was dealing with the nerves I got by seeing stitches hanging off the needle. If any of you haven't tried it and were wondering how it is, give it a try. I'm such a newbie to knitting that "if I can do it anyone can". I had some trouble around the thumb due to this being the first time I've used waste yarn in such a way that when I removed the waste yarn I had opposing live stitches. I must have inserted the needle in the unanchored stitches incorrectly because when I started knitting them they totally unraveled so I had to do a backward loop cast on to recover. It left a bit of a hole which I closed up with a couple of hand stitches. The other change I made was that I tried the picot bind off but found it too loose for my hands. I'm also not sure if I executed it correctly as it didn't look very neat. I'll have to practice that sometime.

What are your holiday weekend plans? MFB may possibly be traveling and I will be painting. I'll be staying away from the university town as it is move in week at Penn State and it's also the first home football game of the season for the Penn State Nittany Lions. I won't be cutting the grass again as this will be the third weekend in a row that we will have a significant amount of rain. Did I mention that I'll be painting?? Hope you and yours stay safe and happy on this busy weekend.