Blends — Gradient fills across up to three colors

What is a Blend?

A gradient fill across up to three colors within one fill region, with control over where each color sits and how soft the transitions between them are — useful for shading, sky gradients, or any area that shouldn’t read as one flat color.

How do I turn a fill into a Blend?

Tap Blend in the object’s action grid (or a group’s action grid, for a blend that spans several fill objects together).

What does the gradient bar do?

It’s the main control surface, shown in the group inspector once a Blend exists: drag a divider between two color zones to redistribute how much space each color gets across the gradient; tap a divider (instead of dragging it) to open a softness slider for that specific transition, so you can make one boundary crisp and another very soft in the same blend.

What do the per-layer sliders control?

Each color layer in the blend has its own position, softness, and intensity sliders, on top of the shared divider controls — for fine-tuning one color’s presence in the gradient independently of the others.

What are “Flow lines” in a Blend?

The same Flow tool shared with plain Fill fields: draw a guide line across the shape and the stitch rows bend to follow it, rather than running in one fixed compass direction — useful when a gradient needs to follow a curved form (a cheek, a wave) rather than a straight scanline angle. In a Blend it can be set once at the group level so every color layer follows the same guide.

Can I change or lock the angle for a whole group of blended fills?

Yes — angle can be locked at the group level so every member fill shares one consistent direction, with the axis re-derived automatically as you adjust it, rather than having to match each member’s angle by hand.

Can I copy a Blend recipe to another fill?

Yes — copy the blend “recipe” (colors, positions, softness) from one fill and paste it onto a different fill shape, rather than rebuilding the same gradient by hand each time.

Can I combine a Blend with Sashiko?

No — Blend and Sashiko are mutually exclusive on the same object.

The check says a transition is abrupt. What is it measuring?

How many stitch rows land in the crossfade — not how wide the crossfade is.

Two colours turn into a gradient by alternating their rows until the eye stops resolving them individually. That takes rows to alternate. If too few stitch rows fall inside the overlap, the interleaving stops reading as a mix and starts reading as stripes, and at the low end the two colours simply meet at an edge with no overlap at all.

The finding names the position along the gradient as a percentage, so there is somewhere to look. Two things fix it: widen that transition on the gradient bar, or lower Density so more rows fall inside the width you already have.

Row spacing is why the same gradient can be fine on one design and abrupt on another. A transition 4 mm wide holds eleven rows at 0.35 mm and six at 0.65 mm — so a blend that works at one row spacing reports itself at another, and a small motif reports what the same recipe did happily at twice the size.

This is advice, not a limit. A deliberately hard colour break is a legitimate look; the check only makes sure it is the one you chose.