I made some botanical old book page coasters as a present for my sister-in-law a few months ago. I really liked how they came out , so I decided to make another set. I originally intended to give them as a gift to a good friend, but I ended giving him something else. So I guess for now the coasters are mine.

I wanted to make them masculine so I decided to use blueprints. I basically did a google search and found several plans and elevations of a church, lighthouse and sailboat. And made a set of blueprint coasters for my friend.

This is the floor plan for the lighthouse.

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All the images were black and white, which was a little boring. So I used Picnik, a free online photo editor.  I just used the dual color tool and made all the drawn lines white and the background blue. I cropped and sized the images so they became 4″ x 4″ squares which would fit on the tile. I also wrote the names and locations of the buildings on the images using the text tool.

A word on Picnik; sadly it will be no more on April 19th. But not to worry  PickMonkey (from the makers of Picnik) is still available, free and has pretty much the same features. I found it mentioned on a blog I frequently read. Jonathan (one of the co-bloggers of the site) created a video with a quick walk-through, here.

This is the same image after applying the PickMonkey Warhol tool under the effects section. It works best with line drawing images, but you can play around with regular images and create some really cool effects. I got lots of ideas brewing already for this tool.

Once done I printed the blueprints out and mod podged each one onto regular 4×4 travertine tiles I got at Home Depot. Check out how, here.

On the back I used a slate blue felt that matched the blue of the image perfectly.

I’m kinda liking how my blueprint coasters look in the bar, who knows maybe we’ll just keep them.