Ok, let's look at your lovely inspiration pix. If you like the pale blue drapes, try to find some similarly sleek panels. Blue is tranquil, looks great year round, and picks up the lake tones. While I like blue, I prefer a warmer tone in my master so I've gone in another direction, but you need to feel good in your room. In the inspiration pix, they seem to have echoed the blue with a slightly greyer tone on two regular pillows and two shams. A muted toile adds more interest on the duvet. Two cream pillow cases add pop. A taupey matelasse picks up the carpet color and carries it to the bed. Easy enough to duplicate without a package! I do like the first blue and chocolate package as well as most of the packages though I'm no as fond on the green/cream/chocolate or the last similar blue package. I'd just add a bit of punch with a fun pillow or two if you go the package route. Your current satin and all but one of the pictures you posted have a more tailored feeling than the inspiration photo. The textures stop them from feeling formal, but they are far more structured, so think about which look feels right to you and go for it. Can't see if you have matching lamps and don't know if you really love the scrollwork. If not, maybe pick up lamps with a simpler line and large drum or rectangular shades if that appeals to you. If you want to keep your lamp(s), try a larger shade for more oomph.

We pretty much love everthing about the sink. Aside from the looks which we obviously liked and the fact that no one we know has one, it has been pretty much maintenace free. There are certain foods which strip the color off and leave shiny bright copper spots. But within a day the sink starts to patina(darken) and it looks seamless again. And we've poured plenty of hot and boiling water down the drain and it's never been an issue. Copper is also naturally anti-bacterial so that's another added bonus. We also heard some of the warnings about the copper from Mexico. I will say ours is stoutly made and it weighed a ton. I went with one of the ebay sellers who had been around for awhile and looked through alot of feedback. That's about all I can think of to tell you. If you want I have pics of what it looked like before it was used and how it looks now after a year of use with no more upkeep other than soap and water.

Maybe we should start a TKA forum; there certainly seems to be a lot of people who have had or are having one. There are already good forums out there, though. I don't want to hijack this one with my knee stuff. Good luck to all of us! I did go to town yesterday and looked at BB&B for stoneware to match the Mikasa. I didn't find anything I liked, but have concluded it does need to be a matte finish. My plan is to continue on hobbling through various places that you guys have suggested until I find what I think harmonizes perfectly. You all have given me lots of ideas, and thank you very much. The Mikasa rep I chatted with said they have nothing that will coordinate with Garden Harvest. I asked her about your suggestions, olychick, and she said all of those are glossy. I guess the search will continue. I didn't make it to anywhere but BB&B and Kohl's yesterday. Thanks again, everyone.

Merry Christmas Ginny- Not much time this busy morning for posting, and this is probably too late to be helpful. Recipes for soft dinner rolls are as common as flip-flops in the summer, every common post-WWII cookbook like Betty Crocker, Good Housekeeping, Pillsbury, and the web sites for the yeast companies, will all have recipes for white dinner rolls made with active dry yeast. Prior to that, the homemaker used fresh yeast, and those are the soft white dinner rolls I remember my mother making. If I close my eyes I can still recall the wonderful smell you can only get by using fresh yeast, which is all but unavailable these days. Wal-Mart carried fresh yeast during November and December, and that was the last time I could find it in local stores. It's been at least 15-years since I last bought fresh yeast. The one thing those recipes have in common, and the one tip I can give when making them, is to use all-purpose flour like Gold Medal or Pillsbury, which are National Brands. That was the type of flour used. It wasn't until the advent of the automatic bread machine in the late 1980's that "bread flour" was available for household use. Nearly any recipe that has butter and milk in it will be the one to pick. Avoid using King Arthur All-Purpose or Robin Hood All-Purpose flour because they are higher in protein. If that is the type of flour you have to use, add a little more butter to the recipe (1/2 to 1 T.) to help cut the gluten-development. Hard rolls require flour milled from high-protein hard wheat flour (like bread flour), while soft rolls are best made with flour that is a mix of soft wheat and hard wheat - like National Brands of all-purpose flour. I have a rather interesting bread machine recipe for Soft White Bread that uses 1 cup of white cake mix, which is milled from low-gluten soft wheat, and that is the "secret" ingredient for soft bread. Before going gluten-free, when I wanted to make soft dinner rolls using whole wheat flour (I mill my own flour), I used a 3:2 mix of hard white wheat and soft white wheat (or used a low-gluten flour for the soft wheat like spelt or einkorn). I've been gluten-free for 4-years as of Jan. 1. I now find the smell of bread repulsive. For me, flour was a poison to my body, and for many people it's an addiction. The two isles of the store I try to avoid are the detergent isle due to the onslaught of all the toxic fragrances, and the bread isle. Best of luck on your gluten-free journey. My best advise is to stay clear of processed gluten-free foods due to the high-glycemic flours and starches they are made from. I use coconut flour and nut flour for baking, and have recently added banana flour to the mix, along with milling my own gluten-free flours from a variety of grains/seeds/beans, and I keep rice flour and starches, which are common to all-purpose g-f mixes, to a minimum. When I use rice flour, I soak, sprout, and dry brown rice myself, and mill it into flour to reduce the arsenic found in rice. Nearly all commercial g-f mixes and foods contain cheap, high-glycemic, rice flour. So you are trading one issue - gluten - for another potential issue - blood glucose (and diabetes). I've even been considering a 10-day grain detox to see if I should also eliminate corn from my diet. But I need to get through today, and get the visiting family on their way back to their homes (12-hours away) before the snow storm hits Saturday, before I can even contemplate a detox plan (lol)! -Grainlady