Repeating pattern problem

When I drag my pattern to swatches to create a repeating pattern, it seems to affect the image quality. I print out a sample sheet at home and the image is blurry, porly defined edges and even the colour is slightly different. If I hand place motifs to make a pattern and prit this out, it's perfect. One of my patterns doesn't have a background, but this gets converted to a white background once I make it a pattern in swatches. Anyone have any ideas about this? I use a surface pro. Thanks