Gradient

Video at bottom of page

Available on Desktop and Mobile.

Create a stepped color gradient between two colors and apply it to your warp, your weft, or any selected range of threads. The Gradient tool always works in discrete steps — real yarns, not pixels: eight steps means eight physical colors, and the preview always shows exactly what you will wind.

Opening the Gradient tool

Desktop

There are four ways to open it:

• Yarns menu → Gradient (Yarns and Palettes group)

• Design menu → Gradient (Repeats group, next to Color Pattern)

• The gradient button below the color action icons in the palette sidebar (right side of the drawdown)

• Right-click the WIF Palette → Gradient...

The Gradient window stays open while you work, so you can select ranges, apply, undo, adjust, and apply again without reopening it.

Mobile

Gradient Designer

Quick start

1. Select a range of threads by dragging across the warp or weft color bar with the Select tool (or check All warp / All weft in the Gradient window).

2. Click the Start and End color wells to choose your two colors.

3. Set the number of Steps.

4. Click Apply to Selection.

The status line at the bottom always tells you what will happen — for example, "60 warp ends selected · 7–8 per step."

The controls

Start and End colors

The two color wells flank a strip showing the actual step colors. Click either well to open the color picker. The ⇄ button swaps start and end.

Steps (2–24)

How many distinct colors the gradient uses. Each step is a real yarn color you will need. If your selection has fewer threads than steps, the step count is automatically reduced to fit.

Distribution

Controls how the selected threads are divided among the steps:

• Linear — every step gets an equal share. The classic evenly banded gradient.

• Curve — wide blocks of the start and end colors, with the change compressed through the middle. Use the Transition slider to control how steep the shift is.

• Fibonacci — step widths follow mirrored Fibonacci proportions (wide at the outside, narrowing toward the center). A naturally pleasing, organic spacing.

• Dither — like Linear, but the boundary between each pair of bands is softened by interleaving single threads (...A A B A B B...). The Transition slider widens or narrows the interleave zone.

• Mix — no solid bands at all. Adjacent colors interleave thread by thread across the whole gradient, densest at the transitions. With Steps set to 2, this is the classic two-yarn ombré: start with all of yarn A, sprinkle in single ends of yarn B at increasing density, pass through 1:1 alternation, and finish with all B. The mixing pattern is deterministic — the same settings always produce the same windable plan.

Transition

Controls how fast the color shift happens. Available for Curve, Dither, and Mix (Linear and Fibonacci have fixed bands, so it is disabled there). In all three cases, 100% is the gentlest, widest transition and lower values make the shift faster and more abrupt:

• Mix at 100% blends across the entire selection; at lower values the mixing concentrates around the midpoint of each color change, leaving solid zones between.

• Dither at 100% uses the widest interleave zone at each band boundary while still keeping a solid core in every band; lower values shrink the zone down to a single swapped thread.

• Curve at 100% is the classic ease; lower values push more threads into the outer colors and squeeze the change through fewer middle threads.

Blend

The color space used to compute the in-between colors:

• Perceptual (recommended) — steps are computed in a perceptually uniform color space, so they look evenly spaced to the eye and stay vivid. Saturated opposites (say, indigo to gold) pass through rich intermediate tones instead of muddy gray-brown.

• RGB — plain numeric interpolation, matching what graphics programs like Photoshop do by default.

Mirror

Produces a symmetric A→B→A gradient across the selection — very common in warp winding. Combines with every distribution, including Mix (for a fade out and back).

Snap to yarn colors

This is what turns a gradient from a pretty picture into a windable, purchasable plan. When enabled, every computed step color is replaced by the nearest real color from the yarn catalog, so each step is a yarn that actually exists.

• The dropdown chooses the source: All yarns, Catalog (the built-in yarn catalog), or My Yarns (your personal stash — choose this to design gradients you can wind today).

• The … button opens a checklist of suppliers and yarn lines so you can narrow the pool further — for example, only LoftyFiber 8/2 Cotton. Supplier checkboxes toggle all their lines at once; use All/None to reset.

• The count line shows how many yarn colors are in scope. It turns orange when the pool is smaller than your step count — at that point some adjacent steps will snap to the same yarn and merge, and the status line reports the effective step count.

• Snapped swatches are marked with a small dot; hover the swatch strip to see the yarn names. When you apply, snapped yarns bring their full identity into your palette — name, yarn line, thickness, and setts.

All warp / All weft

Check either box to apply the gradient to the entire warp or entire weft, ignoring any selection. You can check both — each direction gets its own full-length gradient, applied together as a single undoable action. Crossing a warp gradient with a weft gradient (especially with Mix) produces striking iridescent-style colorplay.

The preview strip

The thin strip above the status line shows the thread-by-thread result — this is where Distribution, Transition, Mirror, and Dither/Mix become visible, since the swatch strip alone can't show them. It updates live as you change any setting or drag out a new selection.

Applying

• Apply to Selection writes the gradient to the selected range (or all warp/weft). Each thread gets its step's color, palette entry, and — when Sync Thickness is on — the yarn's thickness. The whole apply is one undo step.

• Add to Palette adds the step colors to your WIF palette as ordinary swatches without touching any threads — useful when you want to place the colors by hand or use them in Color & Weave Explorer.

Trying variations: undo and redo without closing

The ↶ and ↷ buttons in the bottom-left corner (or Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y — Cmd+Z / Cmd+Shift+Z on Mac — right in the Gradient window) undo and redo directly, so the natural rhythm is: apply, look at the drawdown, undo, change a setting, apply again — all without the window ever closing.

Tips

• Two-yarn ombré: Steps = 2, Distribution = Mix. Only two shuttles or two warp yarn packages needed. Lower the Transition slider if you want solid areas at each end with a faster blend between.

• Shop your stash: Snap to My Yarns and scope to one yarn line — the gradient becomes a plan you can wind immediately, and every step in the palette carries the real yarn's name.

• Banding too visible? Switch Linear to Dither for softened boundaries, or Mix to remove bands entirely.

• Warp + weft together: check both All warp and All weft with the same two colors for a woven color field that shifts in both directions.

• Your settings (steps, distribution, blend, mirror, snap scope, transition) are remembered while TempoWeave is open, so reopening the tool picks up where you left off.