Week 14: Adobe Illustrator

Drunken Squares © Karen Thiessen 2012

My mom reads my blog every morning and recently she asked me where I get all my ideas. Her question took me by surprise because part of me assumed that everyone had an endless fountain of ideas. I guess not. "Well," I told my mom, "I get my idea-generating abilities from you and dad." My mom does not follow recipes. She can take a shrivelled turnip and make soup for ten unexpected guests in the middle of a snowstorm (she did). Mom regularly makes "clean-out-the-fridge" chili. It's mostly all good. Once in a while, she'll have a culinary disaster, but that makes a great story (like the turnip soup story). Long before the vintage craze, mom refurbished cast-off furniture to furnish our home. She also sewed her clothes and mine. Dad, on the other hand, will bring home the carcass of an old car from the junk yard and in time will restore it to its former glory. His most recent restoration involved bringing a 1956 Ford F-100 "big window" pickup back to life. It took him more than 20 years to source the parts and pull it all together. He's still tinkering with it. In the meantime, he just bought a 1933 Chevrolet to restore. My parents are both creative folks and I am grateful for their positive influence.


My idea for the Drunken Squares pattern came from seeing a Jeanne Beker Edit dress with a dot pattern in The Bay flyer. My pattern looks nothing like the Beker pattern, but it got my mental gears moving. I had to make this pattern a few times before I achieved the desired looseness.