Create A Pattern (click here to download it from the official site) is the latest in a series of incredibly powerful tools which EA has released to the Sims player markets. 

I think a lot of people are brushing these off or taking them for granted, but Create A Pattern (and Create A World before it) are an amazing step towards reaching out to the audience, encouraging more deep-level interaction with the game, and introducing powerful development tools to an audience that might not otherwise seek them out.

The tooltips in CAP are really helpful, although they flickered on my system (Windows Vista) so I had to read them a few words at a time.  I found it a lot more helpful to click the ? at the upper right and read through the eight-page instruction PDF that pops up.

Being a Photoshop user was a hindrance at first, because I assumed that the patterns at the bottom corresponded to Photoshop Brushes.  It was quite vexing until I discovered that instead of painting with those shapes, you simply drag them onto the screen.

These are "Stickers" and they are the basic building blocks of your pattern.  Once you drag a sticker onto your swatch, you can move it around, rearrange the layer that it's on, and resize it by dragging its corners.  

You can also "import a sticker," which just means bringing your own image into the tool.  Each tile is 250x250 so you will want to crop and resize your image to that size before importing.  (The tool has limited abilities to resize on import, but it complained when I asked it to resize an 800x600 image.)  This is how I was able to import a funny picture of my cat, which I can now use to wallpaper my Sims' house.  HA HA HA!

To get your new pattern into your game, first you save it in CAP.  Then you export it.  Then you open up the Game Launcher, go to the Uploads panel, and click to upload it to the Sims 3 website.  Then you log into the Sims 3 website, go to My Page -> My Studio and click the "Add to Game" button.  Once it has downloaded, go back to the Launcher, go to the Downloads panel, and click to install it.

(And at this point, if you're like me, this is where you discover that when you save and export a pattern file, all of the invisible layers become visible!  How embarrassing.)

If this seems a little cumbersome… I would have to agree.  I find it interesting that EA basically requires you to share your new pattern with the world if you want to make one.  

Once I went back and fixed my pattern file, I was able to apply it in-game.  I started by updating the wallpaper, and then decided to use it on a t-shirt instead.  As you can see from the picture above, each single "tile" is about the size of one side of a t-shirt.  Which is convenient if you want to make your own shirt designs - you don't have to worry too much about how it's going to wrap around.