Carving — relief in a single colour

What is carving?

A line you draw into a fill that the fill’s needle holes line up on. Nothing extra is stitched in a second colour and almost nothing extra is stitched at all — the rows that were going to be sewn anyway put one of their penetrations exactly on your line. Where enough holes sit in a row, the thread parts a little and the surface reads as a groove: relief in one colour, for the price of a handful of stitches.

That is the whole idea, and it is also its limit. Carving cannot draw in a second colour, and it cannot make a mark where there are no rows to borrow holes from.

Where do I find it?

Select a fill and scroll its inspector to the Carving section, below the fill pattern and above the underlay. It is a fill-only feature: satin columns, running stitches and Sashiko fills have no Carving section, because there is no field of rows for the holes to line up in.

How do I draw a carve line?

Tap Draw carve line (New motif once you have one) and draw on the shape with the Pencil. The button reads Drawing… while the pen is armed, and a banner says “Draw a carve line — the needle holes line up on it”.

Keep drawing and every further stroke joins the same motif — a club takes three strokes and still repeats as one club. The pill at the bottom counts “N strokes in this motif”; Done puts the pen down. There is no Cancel, because every stroke is its own undo step.

Clear removes all motifs from the object; the trash button in a motif’s row removes just that one.

Why is my line barely visible?

Because it runs along the fill rows instead of across them. A row can only give up a hole where it meets your line, so a line crossing the rows at a right angle collects a hole every quarter millimetre or so, while a line lying parallel to them gets one hole per row spacing — about four times fewer. That is not a setting, it is the geometry of a tatami fill.

StitchPencil measures this and says so: when a worthwhile stretch of your line runs with the rows, a warning box appears telling you how much of it stays faint, and offers Turn the fill to N° — one tap, and the rows cross the line everywhere. Turning the motif instead (see Rotation below) does the same job from the other side.

What do Rotation and Size do?

Rotation turns the motif in place, −180° to +180°. Size scales it from 25 % to 400 % of what you drew. Both act on the whole motif, and both are the quick fix for a pattern that fights the fill angle.

What is “Repeat over the fill”?

It tiles the motif across the whole shape instead of leaving it where you drew it.

• Spacing is the gap between the copies, edge to edge, 0 to 40 mm.
• Offset every other row staggers alternate rows so the repeat doesn’t read as graph paper.

Each stroke repeats on its own, so adding another stroke enriches the pattern rather than rearranging it. What you drew stays where you drew it; the copies step outwards from there.

What is in the motif library?

From library opens a sheet with two sections. Patterns holds ten built-in tiles; Your motifs holds what you have saved, and starts out saying “Motifs you save land here — draw one, then tap the disk.”

Tapping a built-in pattern drops it into the fill, centred on the shape, and sets spacing and stagger to the values that tile was designed for. Tapping one of your own inserts it centred, at the size you drew it, and leaves the spacing alone.

To save one, tap the floppy disk in the motif’s row, give it a name and tap Save — a motif saved that way can be dropped into any fill later. To delete one, long-press its tile in the library and choose Remove.

Which patterns are built in?

Ten textures, all line work rather than filled shapes, sized so a normal motif shows six to ten repeats rather than three:

• Waves — a running wave, the plainest of the set.
• Arches — a row of arcs, staggered.
• Scales — overlapping scallops, staggered.
• Basketweave — four short lines in three directions, woven.
• Diamond — a closed lozenge, the one geometric grid.
• Net — two crossing diagonals, an open mesh.
• Bricks — offset dashes with a tight 1.2 mm spacing, so the courses read as a wall.
• Meander — a continuous Greek key.
• Feather — a spine with four pairs of plumes.
• Spiral — two and a bit turns, staggered.

Sashiko motifs are deliberately not among them — Sashiko is its own stitched fill, not a groove.

Can I edit a motif’s shape after drawing it?

Yes — Nodes in the motif’s row opens the ordinary node editor on it. The freehand stroke is fitted to a curve first, so you get real handles rather than a hundred sample points.

The nodes of every stroke of the motif are shown at once, and dragging one belonging to another stroke simply hands the editing over to that stroke — no tapping around to pick one first. The count under the panel is the motif’s total, which is what you can see on screen. Smooth irons all strokes by the same radius, and Simplify nodes thins them all with one shared tolerance, reporting “Simplified: A → B nodes” — or saying outright that every node is needed.

Tap the path to insert a node, drag the path to bend it into a curve. A carve stroke has no start and no end that matter, so there is no Reverse direction, and it is never offered to close the path.

Does carving show in the stitch player?

Yes. The Stitch player marks every penetration that landed on a carve line in a tinted dot — darker than the thread on a light colour, lighter on a dark one — and the marks appear as that part of the design is sewn, not from stitch 0. Pinch to zoom in up to 8× and drag to pan, which is usually what you need to judge whether a groove will actually read.

That view is also the honest one: where your line runs along the rows you will see the dots thin out.

How many stitches does carving cost?

Almost none. A carved row gets one penetration moved onto the line rather than a new pass over the shape, so the stitch count barely moves — check it in the status pill before and after if you want the number for your own design.