Dawn Brocco's Life & Design Blog

I have been working on the Alpaca Boucle Jacket, but took a break to check up on some web sites. There's one I've been checking on, now and then, waiting on it's arrival, and that's Classic Elite. Well, fellow knitters, it is UP!

Classic Elite Yarns

A simply elegant site that's easy to use and loads quickly on dial-up. Thank goodness not everyone has forsworn us dial-uppers with Flash and Shockwaves!

Now, Wheelsmith Wools has been down awhile. Get one and lose one, I guess!

Am discussing, with hubby, the final trimmings in our finally renovated kitchen. This kitchen was a horror. An old back porch that was added onto *very* poorly. (We overlooked a lot when we bought this place.) Hubby gutted it, walls, flooring, ceiling, roof needed rebeaming to actually have an angled, not a flat, roof, reroofed, gutter, windows, door, sills, plumbing, wiring...

Then insulation in the crawlspace under, laid tongue and groove pine boards to simulate the old wide board floors and shellacked it, new cupboards, counter top, restored white double oven stove, original, wide, cast iron double sink, where one sink is very deep (boy am I gonna miss that! - so many new sinks are so dinky).

We've decided on blue and white toile wallpaper (do I love toile, but haven't had occasion to get any until now!), just below chair rail height and some matching blue tile to cover the outside of the 42" wide custom oven range hood he built, complete with halogen lights (I married a genius!).

The cupboards are white, with glass-panelled uppers on one wall, blue mottled (small speckle) countertop and that warm shellac color on the floor - very light and airy country or as my Dmom says - Nantucket! Well, what could be better than that! White painted country table and alder ladderback chairs I put together from kits 10 years ago, and lace curtains. When it's done, I'll post photos. We're really pleased with it, as we had to keep all the door and window openings, as well as plumbing pipes where they were, to keep costs down. So I re-designed the layout, as there's 3 doorways and 4 windows in a 15-16' square space, so everyone kept walking through the work triangle. Well, I *fixed* that and rerouted the traffic.