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We human beings like patterns. We use them to decorate our clothes, our bedcovers, our curtains. Architects in more aesthetic times used them as a matter of course, to bring character to what would otherwise be blank facades: you can see them in decorative brickwork, ornate iron railings, and even on features as mundane as skirting boards. Where there are no patterns, we fancy we see them anyway, finding repetition in swirling snowflakes, or a page of type.

Nature thrives on pattern, too. The astonishing peaks of a Romanesco cauliflower; leaves symetrically edging each side of a twig; the stripes on a bee. There are good reasons, science has discovered, for all this regularity, and they are reasons far more to do with health than pleasing the human eye, but it is a pleasant side-effect that we are pleased.

What is a pattern? I suppose, simply, it is a repeating shape or motif, but it does not have to be entirely regular. The machine age might have brought precise copies within our grasp, but we only have to think of the iconic, hand-painted Greek border pattern that famously adorns ancient vases to realise that pattern predates our ability to regularise so exactly.

Today’s task is to notice patterns as you go through your day. How you use them is up to you. Maybe one day you’ll have a go at hand-making wrapping paper, or you’ll make use of it at one of those pottery painting cafes. Or, like Orla Kiely, maybe you’ll make a career out of spotting simple patterns in nature and replicating them.