Socka socka socka!

Here are the long-awaited SOCK UPDATES!!!

Dene finished some awesome purple-black-coral Koigu Jaywalkers and posed them in an orange tree.

Adrienne has a pair of F socks (Jaywalkers) and a pair of brownie point socks ("standing in the shadow of love"):



Adelle forgot to tell me about the two pairs of socks she made in January! Bad girl! She made an awesome pair of Socks That Rock socks and a pair of Jaywalkers.

Johanna already got brownie point credit for these but couldn't show them until now because they were a gift. Lucky Melanie!

Jill finished some Melted Crayon socks for her mom in Knit Picks Dancing. Very funky.

They aren't socks, but I posted a new album with my Masters Level I swatches for anyone that's interested. The pics of the cable swatches didn't come out very well, and I didn't realize it until the box was already in the mail, but the rest turned out okay. I am so happy to have that done! Keep your fingers crossed for me that I don't have too many reworks...

I had the second-to-last of my Survey of Fashion classes last night. For the final project, we are making trend boards. This involves going to a store (I chose Ann Taylor and went to the website instead of the store since going to the store w/ two kids in tow is like my worst nightmare...), observing what colors and silhouettes are prevalent in their new spring lines, coming up with your own theme, going to the fabric store and picking out swatches that go along with your theme, going through magazines and picking out pictures that go along with your theme, gluing them all to a piece of illustration board and then presenting them to the class with your ideas about why what you've picked will sell. Whew!

Fortunately I had the non-pointy end of the babysitting swap stick yesterday, so I headed over to Fabric Depot to browse through their gazillions of bolts. They also have a yarn section which is mainly dominated by the ghetto brands, but I did manage to find these lovelies hiding at the bottom of a rack off to the side:


One of the crazy things about Fabric Depot is that they have these super long sales where everything in the store is 30% off. So these were all 30% off. Yay! I'm thinking I will swatch and hopefully have enough for the design I'm doing for Knitter's since I really like it and would love to have my own.

Here are the swatches I got, and I decided that, since my main focus is knitwear design, I'd knit up a few little squares as well (any excuse to buy more yarn, right?):


So the main color themes are the graphic black-and-white prints at the top, then a range of pastels ranging from eggshell through mint green and over to light blue through navy. They aren't necessarily what I'd pick for my own clothes, but one of the things we're supposed to be learning is how to disassociate ourselves from the process and see what sells, not just what we like. I based all these color choices on what I saw on the Ann Taylor site.

I'll show you the finished board next week. It's a great process, and I got quite a few ideas as I was paging through the fashion mags at class last night. One funny thing was that when the instructor was giving us a walk-through of the process, she kept talking about tunics and how she wanted to put tunics in her line. Well, as I was paging through Elle or In Style (can't remember where exactly I saw it), they had a little chart of what's in and what's out... You guessed it - tunics are out. I think the instructor is great, but I did get a little chuckle out of that.