knitting question -- online design / lace sites?

[girl-starfish.livejournal.com]

Hello! Long time lurker, first time poster.

The weather just turned sunny and hot here, and the wool knitted projects I'm working on are too heavy to knit without being scratchy and suffocating, so I'm turning my attention to knitting a summery top out of cotton yarn.

I haven't been able to find the exact pattern I want so instead, I'm going to try my hand at making up a pattern. I know that I want to have a lace trim at the bottom, and possibly sleeves as well. I also want to incorporate those funky old Chinese and Japanese coins with the holes in the middle. To that end, I'm asking you guys if you know of any links to online sites that have examples of lace-type knit patterns, and instructions, and any sites that are useful in designing a pattern -- for calculating a guage, fit, all that sort of thing. I'm still very new to this, and haven't done this before, so any help is appreciated!





This is the yarn I'm intending to knit with. I got a couple of balls so I could play around with gauge, lacey patterny stuff, see if I could figure out a way of getting the coins in there. I haven't actually got the coins yet, but the shrine near my house has an antique market on the 4th Sunday every month and there is a guy there with a huge tray of the old coins so I don't think it'll be a problem. The bag is from Vietnam, handmade but not by me, but you can see that it uses the kind of coin I'm thinking about. Also, it's cool and might give you guys ideas. Not that you seem to need any, being hugely crafty and all.



And one of my two in progress projects at the moment, the leftover vest from knitty.com.



((Cross posted to 20sknitters -- apologies to anyone who sees this twice!))