Virtual bricklaying

This (large helps) is what I have spent most of my waking and some of my sleeping hours doing this week and the pattern obsessive in me is really struggling. I've taken dozens of photos of brickwork in the part of Oxford where I live and I increasingly know what I don't like but I don't know how to find a pattern that I can live with every day for the rest of my life. I also did some measuring and some sums and discovered that I have 67% of the bricks I need, so I have to decide what to buy to add to my 100-year-old bricks. Comments and suggestions very welcome, bearing in mind that my bricks are mottled rather than uniform.

Those of you who know anything about print/web layout will be appalled to discover that I did this in my 15-year-old version of QuarkXPress that works only on my equally ancient and s - l - o - w PC. Every one of those bricks is an empty text box. I so wish I could draw. Or had AutoCAD.

Anyway I have decided I will never do such a thing again so today I bought Affinity Designer. It's Affinity/Serif's competitor to Adobe Illustrator which I have used minimally so I have a lot of learning to do. In so doing I discovered that Affinity is selling all its software for half price until 30 June so if you're tempted to ditch expensive rented Photoshop, as I did three years ago, now would be a good time to do it. (I have no shares in Affinity and my only connection is as a user.)

I was thrilled to bits this evening to get a message from Offside Books to say they have sold the first of my photos - the one in the yellow frame in the extra here, or here unframed. (I can't help thinking that the frame colour was what sold it.) So before I learn to use Affinity Designer I'm going to have to find out how to build myself a website.