Pattern Plume

Seamless repeats for cloth, paper & walls

Seamless repeat maker

Drop in a motif and get a tile that repeats without a seam, in full drop, half drop, brick or mirror. Check the edges, then download the tile at full resolution.

1Motif

Drop a motif or a tile here

PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF, AVIF or SVG. You can also paste an image. Nothing is uploaded.

Or start from a sample motif

Sample: Peacock plume, 448 × 770 px.

3Preview

View
50%

646 × 508 px tile holding 2 columns, each dropped by half a cell. At 150 DPI one repeat prints 4.31 in (10.94 cm) × 3.39 in (8.6 cm).

2Repeat

Repeat type
60%
20%
10%
0°
0%
0%
Background
Custom

How to make a seamless repeat

Drop a motif onto the box, choose a file or paste an image, and the tile is rebuilt as you change any setting. A motif can be a single object on a transparent background, such as a flower cut out in a drawing app, or a finished square of artwork. With Trim empty edges on, transparent margins are cropped so spacing is measured from the motif itself.

The four repeat types

  • Full drop (block): motifs sit in a straight grid, side by side and directly above one another. The tile is one cell.
  • Half drop: every second column slides down by half a cell, so motifs line up on the diagonal and the grid is harder to spot. The tile is two cells wide; a third or quarter drop makes it three or four cells wide.
  • Brick: the same idea turned sideways. Every second row shifts across by half a cell, like brickwork, and the tile is two cells tall.
  • Mirror: the motif is reflected left to right and top to bottom, giving four versions in a 2 × 2 tile.

The other settings

Scale is a percentage of the image you dropped. Space across and Space down add room between motifs as a share of the motif's size; negative values make neighbours overlap. Rotation turns every motif. Offset moves the motif within its cell, which changes where the tile's edges fall but not how the pattern looks. Seam check cuts the tile in half both ways and swaps the pieces, so the old edges cross in the middle along the dashed lines: any break there would show as a line on fabric.

Example: the peacock plume sample is 448 × 770 px. At 60% it becomes 269 × 462 px; with 20% space across and 10% down each cell is 323 × 508 px, so the half-drop tile is 646 × 508 px and holds two plumes. At 150 DPI one repeat prints 4.31 × 3.39 in (10.94 × 8.6 cm).

Sources

  • Spoonflower Help Center, Repeat Options: basic, half-drop, half-brick and mirror repeats as print services use the terms.
  • Spoonflower Help Center, 150 DPI: The Best Resolution for Spoonflower: design size is the pixel size divided by 150, used in the example above.
  • Wikipedia, Wallpaper: the pattern repeat as the smallest rectangle that tiles to form the whole pattern, and how drop patterns are matched between strips.

From tile to print

Three more tools for the same tile.

Questions

What is the difference between a half drop and a brick repeat?

Both stagger the motifs by half a cell. A half drop moves every second column down, so the stagger runs vertically; a brick (or half brick) repeat moves every second row across. Spoonflower describes its half-drop and half-brick options the same way.

Why is my half-drop tile twice as wide as one motif cell?

Because the second column sits lower, the smallest rectangle that repeats on a plain grid has to hold both columns. That makes the downloaded tile ready to repeat as it is: if a print service asks how to repeat it, choose its basic or straight option, otherwise the drop is applied twice.

Are the downloaded tiles really seamless?

Yes. Every motif that crosses an edge of the tile is also drawn on the opposite side, so the right edge continues the left one and the bottom continues the top. If you drop in a finished square of artwork with the spacing at zero, the result can only be as seamless as that artwork, which is what the seam check is for.

How big should my motif be?

Big enough for the printed size: pixels = inches × DPI. Spoonflower, for example, prints at 150 DPI, so a repeat 8 inches wide needs 1,200 pixels across. Scaling a small image up makes it soft, so start large and scale down.

Can I make a tossed or random-looking repeat?

Not automatically: this maker places one motif per cell. For a tossed look, arrange several motifs at different angles in one image first, drop that in as the motif, and use a half drop with little or no spacing.

Is my image uploaded anywhere?

No. The image is decoded and drawn in your browser and never sent to a server. When you send a tile to another tool, it is kept in this tab's session storage, which the browser clears when you close the tab.