I have being working with Xara since its version 1 when it was called Corel Xara, back in the days of Corel Draw 4 I believe and since then I dropped the use of Corel Draw completly! I do everything in Xara: web design, icons for software, printing stuff, etc and since a year more or less now I'm using it to design japanese swords and create their motifs I etch on steel and copper. This is a hobby of mine for my <cough>free<cough> time, which I really love but as a hobby it needs to wait until I finish a project.

So...what I basically do is to design what I want in Xara, then transfer the design to the steel pieces and as a last step, etch it in an electrolitic salted water bath. I took me a looooooong set of experiments to come up with the correct way to do this. I work everything by hand without powetools, using trashed material and have pictures of the processes creating the swords, yet I guess this may not be the right forum to show that stuff, unless you ask me

This is the design for a tsuba (sword guard) and how the steel object looks

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And this is the blade work

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