My new coaster!

Dave originally asked me if I could sew him some coasters because he didn't like how his current cork coasters kept sticking to his drinking glasses. Somehow this project didn't inspire me very much. But recently Dave bought a fancy new Adobe Illustrator software program and has been raving on and on to me about how powerful this program is and how many fancy things it can do. So that inspired me to try drawing a simple little (coaster-size) sewing project in the computer.

I thought I would need to borrow his fancy software but he told me I should be able to do the same thing in Corel Draw. (Don't worry, he wasn't being stingy. It would just save me from having to use the software at his house.) Although I didn't have any luck the previous time I tried to draw something on the computer, I figured I'd give it another go....

And I'm so glad I did because I was able to create this little owl in less than a half hour! I was so excited and couldn't wait to bring him to life in wool! Once I got the hang of using the drawing program, it was so much easier for me to draw the pattern shapes by computer instead of trying to do them by hand.

You can see that he's mostly made up of a bunch of triangles and oval/circle shapes. Using these basic shapes, I made a few tiny tweaks to try and give him a little more character and voila! I think he's really cute and I may whip up some others to complete a set.

It was fun to draw this way because it was so much easier to adjust shapes and keep things symmetrical. And it was also much easier to size the scale of the finished drawing once I was happy with the design.

As for Dave, although he admired my handiwork he said that he "wasn't into fabric coasters". Go figure!