Time to Get Creative

With the contrast yarn commandeered at the festival, I can now get on with designing some socks for my sister. She, much like me, prefers graphic designs versus snowflakes, flowers or animals. With some help from Excel, I started playing around.

These are just a couple. I'm not sure if they will truly work as there are quite a few long runs of color. Too much of an opportunity for puckering or pulling of floats. Both of these were inspired by designs in the book Celtic Charted Designs. Of all things, it's a needlepoint book! It has wonderful graphic charts though, and I found quite bit to be inspired by in there. I'm getting closer to what I want, but not quite there yet. Borders and side motifs have yet to be determined also. The colors, however, are good to go.

I'm not sure if I'd like the blue as the base background and the orange as the accent, or the other way around. It seems like I automatically think to put the darker color as the base, but I'm wondering how the orange would be as the main color. It is a great orange and deserves a lot of knitting real estate.

As the next design takes shape, I am still puttering away on Canal Du Midi. I am at the heel of sock #2 and am very anxious to get these done so I can move on! I do have to do a bit of ripping at the toe of #1 - the recipient changed mid-stream, so I need to make them a few rows shorter than originally intended. No big deal.

Still on a high from the festival this past weekend, I'm loving reading everyone's blog recaps of the event. I even found a few stealth photos taken of my socks on the move! How neat is that!

With no time to waste, all it took was me reading a post on one of the boards and my mind was racing towards the next yarny event. Last year was the first time I attended Stitches East and had a great time. Any excuse to get down to Baltimore and visit! Well, they have put up the class brochure for this year and I'm already thinking about what I'd like to take. I have never taken any kind of knitting class before (I am totally self taught via the internet and books), but I'd love to learn continental knitting, or maybe intarsia. There are so many to pick from! What knitting skill would you would like to learn?