A challenging floor pattern

The pattern of the inlaid linoleum flooring is amazingly cool, but the problem was I couldn't just look it up on the internet somewhere. Like everything else in this project I had to make it from scratch using only photographs of the room. All photographs I use for reference are of the Titanic's sister ship Olympic, which was almost a carbon copy of Titanic.

A debate among Titanic buffs has sometimes been that Titanic had carpet in the dining saloon unlike Olympic which had linoleum. Fragments of linoleum tiling identical to Olympics' was recovered from the Titanic wreck site however some think that possibly carpet was laid down over the tiles. At any rate, I decided to go with the linoleum pattern. I'm posting a link here to show Titanic's very own dining saloon tiles.

http://titanic.marconigraph.com/journey137.jpg

I started with some photographs and graph paper. After drawing out the basic design shapes I scanned the drawing and cleaned it up in photo shop. I then added some color and tweaked it a bit, and wow - it turned out! I know it sounds kinda easy but it was officially not. I printed it on card stock with a slight texture and it is a spitting image of the original floor... in miniature of course. I was so excited about how well the pattern turned out that I decided to go ahead with the whole project. I knew it would take considerable time, effort and ingenuity, but hey - if the floor turned out this great I knew I could tackle the rest. So far it has been a joyful hobby with lots of "how the heck am I going to do that" moments, but I think its turning out even better than planned.