Lovin' the oven

When you realise the journey that our new oven had to make, you will understand why we breathed a cautious sigh of relief when it arrived. Our home is 17 hours away from Kathmandu and the last part of the oven's journey was on a rickshaw.As we said in yesterday's post (this is feast or famine blogging!) we are keen to become a cleaner, greener and more efficient organisation and our small toaster ovens were seriously lacking in reliable temperature control.  Also we were heartily sick of the noisy, expensive-to-run generator.None of the Samunnat ladies had seen an oven quite like our new Elba before.  They were intrigued, frightened, excited and  curious. Yesterday we calibrated our oven, watching it anxiously over several hours to check that temperature control was just right and to see if various parts of the oven heated up differently.  Today we cooked our first new-oven- baked-batch-of-beads - a custom order of laliguras Bindu Mala for lovely Sally from Albury Picture Framers and being able to cook more at once means we have a fighting chance of getting the beads to her in time for Christmas sales!We are over the moon that so far it has all worked out. Ovens have been a source of constant frustration so we are very hopeful that this will be one less thing to worry about now!Pramila is pointing with a bandaged finger as she suffered our first (and we hope last) work place injury. Fortunately, what could have been nasty was not too bad and and she came back from a visit to Emergency with a bandage not stitches! Still able to string beads...a true heroine!