Krokbragd Designer

What It Does

Krokbragd is a traditional Scandinavian three-shaft weft-faced weave — the weft completely covers the warp, and color is carried in the wefts. The defining visual is the way each row tiles across the width: with the classic 1-2-3-2 threading, every row of three weft picks paints as c1 c2 c3 c2 across the cloth, doubling shaft 2 and giving the cloth its characteristic columnar look.

Designing krokbragd by editing a weave draft directly is awkward because the visible surface is the weft, not the structure — what you paint as a "pick" in the draft isn't what the eye sees in the finished cloth. The Krokbragd Designer lets you paint the finished surface directly, then click one button to generate a full draft (threading, treadling, tie-up, and colors) in a new tab or in your current draft.

The designer is yarn-aware: every pick stores a palette index, not a raw color, so yarn metadata (name, sett, variegation) carries through to the generated draft and to your loom. The design itself is saved inside the TWA file, so reopening a krokbragd-generated draft lets you keep editing the original surface rather than the underlying structure.

Opening the Designer

Ribbon: Design tab → Weave Explorer group → Krokbragd Designer button (KeyTip KB).

The designer opens in its own window centered over the main app. Your design state is remembered with the TWA — close and reopen a krokbragd-generated draft and the designer restores the same rows, palette, threading, and shed.

The Dialog

The window is laid out as:

Top settings strip — Threading variant + preview, Shed direction, Warp units, Default repeats, Zoom −/+, and Grid toggle. Spread across the top so the working area below has room.
Cloth surface (left) — The live render of the weft-faced surface. Right-anchored like the main drawdown. Click any cell to paint it; click the dark area below the cloth to add a new row.
In this design — A compact strip of the palette entries currently used in the design. Click any swatch to make it the active paint color.
Rows (left of the right panel) — One row per 3-pick weft sequence. Each row shows three swatches (the c1 / c2 / c3 picks), a repeat NumericUpDown (how many times that 3-pick sequence weaves), and a delete button.
Palette (right of the right panel) — The full project palette. Click a swatch to select it for painting. Use Custom color… to add a new color via the color picker; it's added to the project palette so the metadata travels with the design.
Bottom button row — Undo / Redo on the left, Generate Draft / Close on the right.

Settings Strip (Top)

Threading

Four traditional krokbragd threading variants, each with a small preview image showing the units read right to left. The tie-up is generated for you; you don't pick it.

Option

Threading unit

Look

1·2·3·2

The traditional Norwegian krokbragd. Shaft 2 doubled gives the columnar surface (c1 c2 c3 c2 repeating).

1·2·3

Simpler 3-unit threading — three equal columns per row instead of four.

1·2·3·2·1·2

A 6-unit threading with shaft 2 emphasized twice.

1·2·3·1·2·3·2·1·3·2

A 10-unit "advanced" threading that breaks the regular column rhythm.

Shed

Rising Shed (default) is what most jack and table looms produce — pressing a treadle lifts the tied shafts. Sinking Shed is for countermarch or counterbalance looms where the tied shafts go down. Picking the wrong shed will weave the other face of the cloth. The choice flows through the generated draft, View Cloth, and the Cloth Simulator so previews look the same on every loom type.

Warp units

How many times the threading unit tiles across the width. Set this once for the design; the rendered surface adjusts in real time.

Default repeats

How many 3-pick sequences each newly added row weaves by default. Whatever value you set persists into the design, and changing any existing row's repeat also updates this field — so adding a new row inherits the value you most recently used. The field replaces the older "Default picks" label.

Zoom and Grid

The − / + buttons scale the cloth surface. Cmd/Ctrl + / Cmd/Ctrl − does the same from the keyboard; Cmd/Ctrl + 0 is not wired here, but you can use the buttons. The Grid checkbox toggles thin lines between cells when zoomed in enough to see them.

Painting

Two ways to add color:

Click a palette swatch first, then click a cell in the cloth surface. The clicked cell's column tells the designer which of the three picks in that row to recolor (because of the threading: shaft-1 columns paint pick 1, shaft-2 columns paint pick 2, shaft-3 columns paint pick 3). The cell's row tells which design row to recolor. The entire row's tiled appearance updates the moment you click.
Click the dark area below the existing cloth to add a new row using the active palette color and the current Default Repeats value. Multiple clicks add multiple rows. After adding, the cloth pane auto-scrolls down so the new row is fully in view.

The currently selected color is boxed (3 px blue border) in both the full Palette and the "In this design" strip, so you can paint with confidence even when the strip is the only palette you're looking at.

Custom color

Click Custom color… at the bottom of the Palette panel to open the Pick Color dialog. Choose from the project palette, the Active Palette section, or pick a custom color by hex; the chosen color is added to the project palette (with metadata if available) and immediately selected for painting.

Undo / Redo

Every paint stroke, color pick, row repeat change, row add/delete, threading change, and shed toggle pushes onto an undo stack capped at 100 entries.

Undo: button at bottom-left, or Cmd/Ctrl + Z.
Redo: button at bottom-left, or Cmd/Ctrl + Y / Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + Z.

Rows Editor

Each row in the Rows panel represents one 3-pick weft sequence.

The three colored swatches are pick 1, pick 2, and pick 3 left-to-right. Click any swatch to open the Pick Color dialog and re-color just that pick across the entire row.
The repeat field is the number of times the 3-pick sequence weaves before the next row's sequence starts. A repeat of 1 = 3 picks; a repeat of 4 = 12 picks. Changing this field updates the cloth height instantly and also seeds the Default repeats for future row adds.
The × button deletes the row. The last remaining row can't be deleted — there's always at least one row in a design.
+ Add Row below the list appends a new row using the active color and the Default Repeats value. The new row is also reachable by clicking in the dark area below the cloth.

Generating a Draft

When the surface looks right, click Generate Draft. The designer:

Builds a 3-shaft draft using the selected threading variant tiled across Warp Units units.
Generates the tie-up for plain krokbragd (each of the three treadles lifts the two shafts whose number isn't equal to the treadle's number — i.e. treadle 1 lifts shafts 2 and 3, treadle 2 lifts shafts 1 and 3, treadle 3 lifts shafts 1 and 2). If you picked Sinking Shed, the tie-up is inverted.
Writes the treadling, with each design row expanding to 3 × Repeat picks in 1-2-3 / 1-2-3 / … order.
Assigns the per-pick weft colors from the design's palette indices.

The generated draft replaces the current draft if it was an empty starter, or opens in a new tab. The TWA carries the design alongside the draft, and the bottom of the drawdown shows a small purple "Generated from Krokbragd" indicator with an Edit Design button — click it to reopen the designer and keep editing the surface.

Round-Trip Persistence

A krokbragd-generated draft saves:

The standard draft (WIF) — threading, treadling, tie-up, colors. Anything that reads WIF can use this fine.
A krokbragd.json inside the TWA — the original design (rows, threading, shed, warp units, default repeats, palette indices). This is what the designer reloads.
An IsKrokbragd flag in the TWA's metadata so the Edit Design button knows to surface.

If you edit the underlying draft directly (e.g. change a treadling cell) the TWA still carries the original krokbragd design — reopening the designer shows the design as you painted it. To bake a draft into "just a regular draft" with no krokbragd ties, save it without the TWA companion (turn off Settings → Application → Write companion .wif file isn't the right toggle here; instead, File → Save As and pick a different name will create a fresh TWA from current state).

Tips

Open with one starter row. A new design starts with a single 3-pick row in yellow / blue / yellow on a green warp, so you can see how the threading paints c1 c2 c3 c2 at a glance — then either edit it or click below to add more rows.
Paint long stripes by changing Default Repeats first. Set Default Repeats to 6 (or whatever you want), then add several rows in sequence. Each new row inherits the value, so you don't have to retype it.
The "In this design" strip is your fast palette. Once a few colors are in the design, you'll find yourself painting almost entirely from there — it stays small and the selected swatch is always visible.
Use the small threading preview to read the unit. The preview in the settings strip shows the unit reading right-to-left (weaving convention). If a threading variant doesn't look right in the cloth, the preview is the fastest way to verify which shaft a given column lands on.
Cmd/Ctrl + scroll-wheel does continuous zoom inside the cloth surface (via the main app's scroll handler), in addition to the +/− buttons.

Generated Draft Conventions

Three shafts, three treadles. Krokbragd is by definition 3-shaft. The generated draft uses three treadles even on looms with more.
Threading reads right-to-left, matching the main app's right-origin convention and the threading preview shown next to the combo.
Weft-faced cloth view uses a krokbragd-specific surface formula (Approach C) that reproduces the doubled shaft-2 columns exactly, so View Cloth and the Cloth Simulator look identical to what you painted in the designer.
Warp color is the green from the seed (or whatever you set via the WarpColorIndex) — mostly buried under the weft once the cloth is woven, but used for the selvedge and visible at zero weft coverage in the simulator.