[cairo] scaling patterns

[Tim Hirrel]

Greetings, 
I am new to cairo, so please forgive any naiveté.  I would like to to display a pattern at different scales. It seems that this could be done easily if the transform matrix was applied at the time of stroke, but cairo seems to apply it earlier. So it seems it will be necessary to re-do all the draw functions (line-to, arc, etc.) after changing the transform. Any comments or suggests? 
Thank, Tim