How these are made

Every pattern here is built by one construction, worked out from the buildings themselves a hundred years ago. Fifteen grounds, and a single parameter that changes what happens on them.

Grounds that repeat

A tiling of regular polygons, laid down over and over. Cover the page with copies of one patch and you have the whole of it.

Eight-pointed seal
The khatim, an eight-pointed star, set in a ground of octagons and squares.
Octagon and cross
Interlaced octagons, the lines crossing where the squares of the ground fall.
Twelve-pointed star
Twelve-pointed stars on a ground of hexagons and triangles.
Star and cross
Stars and crosses alternating across the field.
Great rosette
A rosette in each octagon, by the transform Kaplan sets out.
Dodecagon rosette
Three orders of star in one field, each drawn as a rosette: twelve, six and four.
Six-pointed field
Sixfold stars on the kagome ground of triangles and hexagons.
Honeycomb lattice
The plain hexagonal ground; open and calm, the easiest of these to colour.
Open field
An open, airy ground that leaves large regions — good for younger hands.
Triangular web
Sixfold rosettes on a triangular grid — the densest ground offered here.
Three-star field
Dodecagons, hexagons and squares, each carrying a star of its own order.
Handed weave
Chiral: the snub-square ground has a handedness, and the pattern takes it too.

Grounds that never repeat

Built by de Bruijn's multigrid: lines at even angles, and a tile at every crossing. There is no patch you can copy to get the rest, and yet every patch comes back.