Boy!  Designing is really tough and a whole lot of work.  I'm working on a pair of socks for my Ghostbusters group on Ravelry and it's not as easy as it seemed.  After some searching, I found a pattern that I thought would be perfect.  I wrote down the pattern to take home and play with, only to find that the pattern was written to be knit flat.  that meant that i needed to tweak it a bit so that it could be knit in the round.  i worked on that part yesterday and emailed the final results to myself at work to be printed down.  later today after i finished my work, i sat down with excel to see how it would chart out.  good thing that i did, because i found that my "in the round" directions were not exactly correct.  i had to adjust some of the decreases so that they formed the shape i was going for.  then i took that info and input it into the MSPaint program so that i could crop it and draw in the pattern repeat.  i saved that and printed it out to take home.
after doing homework and some other stuff, i finally sat down with some left over Socks That Rock (as i'm going to knit the pattern from their light weight yarn) and knit a swatch with the flat directions to get an idea of the gauge in the pattern, and also knit in strait stitch to gauge that as well.  so far i'm hitting 7 stitches per inch on 2.5mm needles.  tomorrow, i'm going to cast on with some other yarn that i get the same gauge with to see if my in the round directions will work and if they make sense.