My reverence for the power of pattern may well have stemmed from the demure stripe hanging idly on a dishcloth, while I brewed my morning tea. What is it about a stripe, or a collection of stripes, that is so appealing? My love affair with stripes is multi-faceted and complex: I like them organized, in neat symmetrical lines; I like to pour them helter-skelter onto a surface see the places they intersect. Every stripe is like a new stripe, and teaches me something different. This stripe, for example, means summer, while another means the smell of grade school desks and essay paper. Stripes were my gateway to pattern design. From there I tried dots, many of them, rubbing shoulders and whispering to each other, dots gone wild, big and small, bouncing around the page. Then, a nip here, a tuck there, and viola! This dot becomes a flower, a thousand flowers, spreading forever in a repeating meadow of imagination. Patterns are addictive, which is why we spread them on tabletops, hang them from clotheslines and wrap them in unending combinations around ourselves. I believe that patterns have the power to unleash a certain type of creativity when you look at them, one that squeezes out from the spaces between lines, dots, zigs, and zags. They teach us the order of spontaneity. It is within patterns that we can begin to understand the world around us, because they show us succinctly how beautiful a simple, organized structure can be. They show us the glory in the seemingly mundane. They teach us to find magic in the never-ending sameness of a thing repeated, again and again. Patterns are the graphic synchronized swimmers of the soul. They dive gracefully into us, flowered caps and all, and we are, will forever be, mesmerized.