Toe Up Lace & Cables Socks

My spinner finally arrived about 7pm last night. I spent about and hour cleaning up my work area so it could fit and then I put it all together. It works pretty good, and I'm starting to get the hang of plying with it. I plied this nice white merino I had into a sock weight and a silk pink cobweb weight into a lace weight. I also plied the strands of some cotton yarn, which makes it easier to work with. The motor is fairly quiet at low speeds but the higher speeds are quite noisy.

So my other obsession lately has been these toe up lace socks I've been DYING to write a pattern for that I finally got to work on yesterday. They are going to have small alternating vertical stripes of lace and cables. So I'm almost to cast on. I have my gauge swatches all set, I have a plan of how to proceed, the only thing I'm missing is what kind of lace panel I'm going to put on the back of the calf for a increase. I need more stitches so I am going to go to the library tomorrow and see what they have for stitch dictionaries and maybe look at the Modern Lace Knitting books again. I think I can get cast on and work on them before I get that set though because it will take a while to get to the calf increase portion. I MAY just chart something myself. We'll see. Something has really clicked lately with my planning projects, I'm really getting how to start with and idea and take it to reality (with knitting)
I like it. And so this post isn't too boring I leave you with a fuzzy web cam pic of my tubular gauge swatch.