Playing with designs

I was playing with graph paper and Excel for charting lace motifs , but disliked the constant erasing and laborious keyboarding. I was thinking I'd love some manipulable thing that could easily translate onto paper when I'd figured out the stitch sequences.. Well, a few years ago I bought a toy called "Magnetic Mosaics" from http://www.orbfactory.com/ for my kids but never used it. I pulled it out, and was very happy to find a set of many colors of 1/4 inch magnets, and a magnetic board. I assigned each stitch a color, in this case blue for knit, black for yarnovers and green for K2tog and SSk, light green for K3tog. I placed a piece of 4 to the inch graph paper over the board, and lined up the magnets on the grid. I enjoyed playing with stitch patterns and was able to create some interesting patterns this way. It made it easy to create a motif, and then move it where I wanted. To insert a stitch, or change a K to a K2tog I could just switch colored magnets or slide a whole row over. I'm enjoying playing with this a lot! I just might design something new...when i finish all the other things in the works. Never enough time!