Problem making repeating pattern swatch

Hi, I have looked at many threads featuring my problems, but none of which I have seen have worked for me. So I am making a a repeating pattern print using hexagons. Normally when I make a print, I go Expand, make a rectangle, Clipping Mask, Crop, then drag over to the swatches panel. I seem to be having issues with everything that I normally do. For a start, I cannot expand, the option is greyed out. (I assume this is something to do with the fact I am using dashed lines on some of my shapes.) So I skipped this part, did my clipping mask, then tried to crop, and it gets rid of all my shapes with dashed lines. Obviously I don't want this, so if I skip cropping, and drag over to swatches, the edges aren't cropped and I've just got big white gaps everywhere and it's not a repeating pattern. - I have also tried resizing art board so there are no white gaps visible, but this makes no difference. So I'm in a bit of a dilemma. I need to be able to crop to get rid of gaps, but to crop I need to make sure all of my detail stays the same, and in order to do this, I need to be able to expand XD

1) No Expand available.

2) Clipping mask applied, before crop

3) After Crop

4) If I skip crop, then go straight to add swatch