Designing a Campus Pattern

Designing a campus pattern is tedious and FUN!  I love the whole process from beginning to end.  

The first thing I have to do is to decide which campus to design.  The first pattern I designed was Baylor University, because it's what I know and love.  I did not attend Baylor, but my husband did.  We got married at the end of his junior year, so I spent a lot of time on campus during my first year as a married lady.  And I loved it!  Baylor will always have a special place in my heart.

Once I've chosen the campus, I do a little research.  Because I have hundreds of pictures of the Baylor campus, it was easy to go to the source for images of our favorite places and buildings.  I also googled...a lot.  It's wonderful to have so many photos with different angles to study each building and the way it should look.  

I knew how large I wanted the finished pattern to be, so I did some cross stitch math to figure out approximately how many stitches each building needed to be.  Then I drew it out.  I'm not a great free-hand drawer, so I just did it to get an idea of the layout of the buildings.

Once I had my buildings and placement in mind, I opened up the MacStitch software and began tediously placing every block of color until the tiny blocks looked like buildings.  

After many many rounds of edits, tweaks, and full building moves, I had a finished pattern.  This whole process took me about a week.