Quote

A pattern is a guide or a model. Patterns are used in sewing and knitting, in wood and metalworking, and in a wide variety of other productive pursuits, activities, and jobs. Patterns help to avoid waste and unwanted deviations and facilitate uniformity that is appropriate and beneficial.

When I write now I do not invent situation, characters, or actions, but rather structures and discursive forms, textual groupings which are combined according to secret affinities among themselves, as in architecture or the plastic arts.

I sometimes feel that a pattern is almost a fashion statement in itself.

Now, there are sometimes making a connection between one section and another that sometimes you do want to see the pattern because it helps you to lead into the next thing - it's a rhetorical thing, where you just see how the pattern has to go into the next thing.

In short, no pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world only to the extent that is supported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it.

If you have multiples of anything, you have the possibility of repetition. Repetition creates pattern and also unity. Put anyone in a room with a pile of similar objects and say, 'I want a pattern by 3 P.M. or no dinner.' Anyone would come up with a design. It is easy, fun and available to anybody. Most people just don't have the nerve.

So many designers only sketch and leave pattern-making to others. Pattern-making is important so you know the structure. Then if someone tells me, 'I can't make a pattern from that sketch,' I can tell them, 'I will make it' and then they are quiet. If I can't make it, I don't design it.

No one ever taught me, and I never had formal classes in pattern making, so I was like, Okay, I'll just drape, and I'll sew as I pin it.