Pin Drop Pattern Design
A simple idea?
You can picture a box of lovely dress-making pins spilling onto the desk in front of you. It is even on the Great Sewing Bee intro. But making this work as a pattern has been a tortuous journey.
Too Many and Too Busy?
How many pins? Which angles to use? The real problem is trying to get a combination of pins to look realistically random – one of the most difficult things to do with a pattern!
Spotting the Glitches
I found using horizontal or vertical pins doesn’t work as they are too easily spotted in the pattern. Having too many going in the same direction was a problem too. As was having too many pin heads in one area and too many pin points somewhere else.
Too few and boring?
By reducing the number of pins it was possible to make the spread of them more even and not to have too many parallel. But as you guessed it – the pattern is a bit dull. So I have re-added a few extras to make it more interesting.
Defining the Pattern Repeat
It would be pretty impossible to create a pattern without seeing how the repeat works. This pattern uses 18x individual pins. Each one is formed of a brush I created in Illustrator. The pin heads and the metal stem and point can all be recoloured for each pattern.
Testing The Pattern Repeat
These full-screen versions use actual pattern repeats, set to repeat and scaled using my CSS style sheet. This is the ideal way to test if a pattern repeat works.
Alternative Colourways
To make creating the pattern easy I started with all the pin heads different colours so I could see which one was the original pin. For the finished designs I made them all the same colour. I then methodically tried combinations of pin colour and backgrounds.
