Last night, my husband took me to a dinner at a nice Chinese restaurant. On the back wall of the restaurant was a large mural of traditionally-dressed people sitting on a red mat, presumably drinking tea. The mat was red and had a basketweave pattern. I knew I could recreate the pattern using PatternMaker. So let's get started.
I wanted the pattern to have a perspective skew, as did the original, so I used the Shear tool to shear the frame. Interestingly, the pattern skewed along with the frame. Cool!
I wanted the mat longer, so I made the frame a bit taller. When you do this, you'll need to reset the pattern so that it fills the frame with a new graphic using the same settings.
So I Reset the Pattern (see the little red arrow in the screenshot below). I fully expected to have the pattern reset to a non-skewed version, but instead, the pattern retained the skew settings. I never really thought about it before, but apparently, you can modify the skew settings of both the graphic and the graphic fill independently. When you Reset the Pattern, the new pattern-graphic (which is an embedded EPS) will automatically reset to not just the settings specified in PatternMaker, but also to the skew settings of the graphic frame.
If you like basketweave pattens, check out one of my other blog posts about this same topic. In that post, instead of PatternMaker, I created the pattern two different ways: one using tables, and one using knitting. Here's the post: Using InDesign Tables to Design a Geometric Color Block Pattern
