Leah picked a sweet challenge for me to do and described it in simple terms – design a Celtic Knot and color is not required.

I just happen to like Celtic designs and have drawn them in the past so I had a battle plan in my head in short order for how to do this as a border made of component pieces, like laying domino’s around a photograph. I would do it digitally to save time.

Naturally I went deeper into it than would have satisfied the criteria and I’d do even more if there were not other things I’m behind on.

First, I selected a photo and cropped it square. Then I marked the perimiter with 20 hashes each side.

I looked at samples of Celtic Knot designs and then made my own based on the look and feel  and the plan that I’d devised and the space they’d occupy. Trial and error and a lot of fiddling around finally got me shapes I liked.

I designed five component panels to build a Celtic knot border around the photo. They are colored to illustrate which are which. Each side of the yellow has three exit points as it was designed to be the corners. After I installed the corner pieces, I then modified the two sides that didn’t link to another panel by looping the exit points on each other and closing the center exit point.

I drew a left (pink)and right (teal)  panel, not knowing that I could use the software to flip one horizontal. I learned that after I did the special panels that were fit beneath the top corners and above the bottom corners.

I planned to use the left panels on the left half of the horizontal sides of the frame and the right panels on the right of center. Then I built a special center panel between them as you see in the lavenderish colored  section. That worked on the top of the frame but when I cloned the top bar of the picture frame to the bottom I unwisely duplicated the left corner. That threw the symmetry off. Then I got confused and finally satisfied all the problems that caused by allowing three copies of the center design on the bottom horizontal.

I then built the four special panels and installed them on the top and bottom of the vertical sides. Yellow part is the pattern for those.

I cloned the top and rotated it and installed it for the sides. All that was left from that point was to join the panels, close the corners with loops, and do general cleanup.

If none of this description makes a lick of sense, then here are the pictures. You  can see the layout tick marks on the left side. What have I learned? That I love this sort of design and it will be showing up in the future on my prints.