The O-Zone

Made Dan’s favorite this time. Banana and Coconut Cream Pie. Haven’t made this in a long time.

It’s cooling in the pantry which is actually as cold as a refrigerator this time of year.

I started on the fifth ball of yarn on my shawl project.  Part way into the sixth ball of yarn I’ll reach the halfway point in the pattern.

There was a time when making pies was one of my favorite things to do, and they always looked pretty when they came out of the oven.  Then I discovered I couldn’t handle gluten and all of that changed.

But now, whining about making pies because I have to use gluten free crusts is a thing of the past.

Watching cooking shows is a good thing, and I learned a trick which, in retrospect, seems obvious.  However, it never occurred to me.

Gluten free pie crust dough is soft, tears if you look at it cross-eyed, and tears even when you’re being a sweet as… well, pie.  Sorry.  Couldn’t help myself.

So here’s the trick 🙂

I have a really cool old bread board which has concentric rings on the back that tell you the proper diameter for various sizes of pie crusts.  I also have two different glass pie pans, an 8″ and a 10″.

First, cover the bread board with plastic wrap and roll out the pie dough, covered with another layer of plastic wrap.  This keeps it from sticking to every surface in the kitchen, another bad habit of gluten free pie dough.  Or maybe that’s because I used to throw it around out of sheer frustration?

Then remove the top layer of plastic wrap from the top of the pie dough and slip the 8″ pie plate underneath the bottom layer of the plastic wrap. Center the pie plate under the dough.

Invert the 10″ pie plate and place over the ie dough sitting atop the inverted 8″ pie plate.

Then carefully invert the two pie plates with their sandwich of pie dough and plastic wrap.

Now remove the 8″ pie plate, and then peel off the plastic wrap.

Hurray!  An untorn pie crust ready to be filled.  Today I had a bowl full of thawed black raspberries which had been coated with my usual mixture of sugar/cornstarch/pinch of salt/bit of ground cinnamon.

I also have a round plastic cutting board which happens to be exactly the same diameter of the top of my 10″ pie plate, and I repeated the steps to create a top pie crust.

Then I decorated the pie and popped it into the oven where it is now baking.

This is exciting.  Pie is pretty much Dan’s favorite dessert and it had been such a pain to make, until today, that it had become a fairly rare event, what with all the cussing and tears.  Now I’m really happy we have so much fruit from our garden in the freezer!

Another project, which I promised Dan would be completed this century.

These boxes are full of yarn and spinning fibers left from our online fiber arts store. I’m going to do a complete inventory, and then I’m going to sort the yarns and put them into marked bins so that if I want to find a yarn I can just go to the right bin and grab it out.

I thought perhaps if I can sort through one box a week and complete the inventory of that box, that later reorganizing the yarns into weight categories (lightweight, sport weight, worsted weight, heavy weight), will only take another few days but at least I’ll have a plan.

I’ll do this in my spare time.  I should be able to find some of that.

Based on my assumption that I’ll need twelve balls of yarn, when I finish this one I’ll be 33% complete.  I always knew my advanced math classes would come in handy. 🙂

Knitting lots of holes, is basically how you sum up lace knitting.

Coldest low temperature we’ve seen so far this winter.

We were still in shadow from the mountains to the east, and the alpenglow was coloring the mountain to the west.

This is what it looked like at -17F this morning.

I’m a couple of rows away from completing the third ball of  yarn, and I’ve completed 25%  of the pattern.  Yay!  Looks like this project is going to take twelve balls of yarn.

Just finished the second ball of yarn today, completing row 80 of 542 rows that comprise the body of the shawl.

The pattern is starting to emerge.

The lace border pattern goes all around the exterior of the shawl.  Then the next pattern also goes completely around the shawl.  Above that is the next pattern which also goes completely around the shawl.  Then I’ll start on the interior part of the shawl which is really complicated.

Just because, I figured out how many stitches will go into this shawl.  192,600.  I’ve got a long way to go.

This is just so much fun and I’m very glad I bought extra yarn as I don’t have to worry at all about running out of yarn on this project.  I keep day dreaming about what I’ll make next of the yarn I have left over. 🙂

The last thing on the shower tile project was completed this morning.

Final bit of grout put in place on the face of the outside curb, shower curtain is hung, and shampoo bottles and soap are in the places.

A shower is in our immediate future this afternoon.  ‘Bout time! 🙂

Harvested our first (and only) orange yesterday. It was delicious! Sort of melted in our mouths.

I’ve saved the orange peel to use as a zest in something.  Now I just have to figure out what that something will be.  We are officially orange farmers!  There are five more oranges growing on the bush (too small to be considered a tree), and a couple of them are starting to get some color other than dark green.  So maybe in another few months we can share more oranges.  We’re just excited we haven’t killed the plant yet.

I’ve finished knitting the first ball of yarn and now working on the second.

Sure glad I bought extra yarn as this is going to take a lot of balls of yarn to finish this project.  Right now I’m doing the really simple part of the pattern.  Can’t really see how it will look until it is blocked.  That is sort of the magic part of lace knitting.

Getting closer to being able to take a shower. Hurray!

Lots of grout work yet to be done, and then caulking the corners and around the walls at the floor level. And no caulk at the moment. Sigh.  Didn’t know we needed a special type of sanded caulk, or we would have gotten it ahead of time.

The snow stopped as well, and it has warmed up to 14.5F above zero.  Amazing how much less firewood we need to heat the house at this temperature instead of -10F.  You can see how snowy the branches are in the window above the shower.

Some things are done, and some things aren’t.

Yay! I’m finally done knitting the bottom border of my lace shawl project.

That seemed to take forever because it was so boring but not something I could go on knitting auto-pilot because then I’d screw up the pattern.  Bad combination.  Boring and have to pay attention!

Next step, pick up the stitches on the edge of the border.

Another boring job.  I added stitch markers for knitting sections as I picked up the stitches, so that I’d know if I had the right amount of stitches for my pattern, and decrease or increase.

Stitches picked up (two too many); two decreases by knitting two stitches together and my math was prefect. And the first row was ready to be knitted.

While I was picking up stitches, I realized I’d put my pretty stitch markers in a safe place.  You know the place.  The one where I can no longer find them.  So online I went and ordered a couple new sets, which I actually needed anyway since I have more than a few projects on needles at the moment.  I suppose I should finish some of those, too.  But I’m going to concentrate on this project now.  Even if I knit every single day it’s still going to take me all winter and part of the spring to finish this.  I managed to knit 8 rows of the shawl body yesterday.  Granted almost all was straight knitting, no pattern at all, but two rows had pattern stitches.

Done eating. Time to play!

So I gave Mish his lion to play with, instead of him playing with my hands and/or balls of yarn.  I rolled another skien of yarn into a ball and he was intensely interested in that project.

Not done. There are still two rows of tiles to get installed on the walls, plus the top and inside of the front curb need to be installed.

The tile will all be installed today, and then tomorrow once the mortar under the tiles has dried enough, the grout can be applied, and then everything can be cleaned up.  Right now the bathroom is your basic disaster zone.

The cold snap is done, and it’s snowing this morning, and we’re above zero!!  Yay!!!

First order of the day was to grout the floor tiles.

The grout lines pretty much blend in with the main color of the tiles.

And then the busiest wall was completed, the one with the cubby hole for soap and shampoo containers to sit.

Debated whether or not to use the 2×2 floor tiles in the back of the cubby hole, and we had enough left over from completing the floor to make that a reality.

Now the rest of the shower is whole pieces of tile so that should go fairly quickly today.  Maybe by Monday this will all be completed.  We hope so anyway 🙂

The floor tile has been set and will be grouted on Friday, and then the wall tiles will be set. Also the tiles on the outside of the curb are in place.

For some reason, we kept thinking we’d selected whiter tiles. We were so happy to see our memory was wrong! This means I won’t have to paint the bathroom a different color. Whew!