Variegated Yarn Guide
Variegated yarns created in the Yarn Catalog
What Are Variegated Yarns?
Variegated yarns have multiple colors along their length — think of a hand-painted skein that shifts from blue to green to gold, or a tweedy wool flecked with bits of different colors. TempoWeave can show how these yarns will actually look in your woven cloth, so you can plan your project with confidence before you ever wind a warp.
Variegation Types
Space-Dyed
Distinct blocks of color with sharp transitions between them. The yarn is one color for a stretch, then switches to the next. This is the most common type of hand-dyed variegated yarn.
Ombre
Colors flow gradually from one to the next with smooth, gentle transitions. There are no hard edges — each color melts into the next.
Self-Striping
Like space-dyed, but with longer color runs designed to produce visible stripes in the finished cloth.
Heathered
A fine, random speckle of two colors mixed together — like traditional tweedy wool. The result is a rich, textured surface rather than distinct color blocks.
Marled
Simulates two plies of different colors twisted together, creating a fine alternating pattern with slight irregularity — just like a real marled yarn.
Where You'll See It
Once you set up a variegated yarn, its colors appear everywhere in TempoWeave:
The drawdown (your main weaving draft)
The warp and weft color bars
Fabric Viewer (realistic cloth preview)
Weave Assistant (pick-by-pick weaving guide)
All printed output — drawdown, threading, treadling, color cards, project summary, and warp winding plan
Setting Up a Variegated Yarn
From the Yarn Catalog
Open the Yarn Catalog and select or create a yarn
Find the Variegation section in the yarn editor
Choose a type from the dropdown (Space-Dyed, Ombre, etc.)
Add color stops — each stop has a color and a position along the yarn (0.0 = start, 1.0 = end of one repeat). The stop color dialog includes a Pick color from screen eyedropper button, so you can sample each stop straight from a photo of the actual skein or painted warp on your screen.
Set the Repeat Length — how many threads before the color sequence starts over
Set the Thread Offset — how much the pattern shifts from one thread to the next (this creates diagonal color flow, explained below)
Watch the preview bar at the bottom to see what your yarn will look like
When you add this yarn to your project palette, the variegation comes with it
From the Project Palette
Double-click a color in your project palette
The same variegation controls are available
Changes here only affect this project — your catalog yarn stays unchanged
Understanding the Settings
Repeat Length
This controls how many cells (threads or picks) make up one full cycle of your color sequence before it starts over.
Short repeat (e.g., 10): Tight, frequent color changes
Long repeat (e.g., 50): Broad, sweeping color blocks
Thread Offset
This is the key to making variegated yarn look realistic. On a real loom, the yarn is one continuous strand — thread 2 picks up exactly where thread 1 left off. The thread offset simulates this by shifting the color pattern from one thread to the next.
Offset = 0: Every thread starts at the same point in the color sequence, creating straight horizontal or vertical bands
Small offset: Gently diagonal color flow across the cloth
Large offset: Steep diagonal color flow
To get a physically accurate result, use the Warp or Weft buttons next to the Thread Offset spinner. These auto-calculate the correct offset based on your project dimensions:
Warp: Calculates the right offset for warp yarn based on your weft pick count
Weft: Calculates the right offset for weft yarn based on your warp thread count
These buttons appear disabled when editing a yarn outside of a project context (e.g., in the Yarn Catalog). Once the yarn is added to a project palette, the buttons become active. You can also set any offset value manually if you want artistic control rather than physical accuracy.
Offset Variation slider
When you set a Thread Offset, every thread starts the variegation pattern at exactly the same shifted position relative to its neighbour, which produces a perfectly regular diagonal stripe — visually clean but artificial-looking, and prone to moiré patterns when the offset divides evenly into the repeat length.
The Offset Variation slider (0–50 %) randomizes the per-thread offset by up to that fraction of the base offset. So:
0 % → every thread uses exactly the configured Thread Offset. Crisp, regular.
10–20 % → small, natural-looking jitter; threads still follow the diagonal but with subtle wobble.
30–50 % → meaningful disorder; mimics the irregularity of hand-dyed yarns where dye lots aren't perfectly aligned thread-to-thread.
The randomization is deterministic per thread index (uses a simple per-thread hash), so the same yarn renders the same way every time you open the file — it's not random on each draw.
Bleed (Space-Dyed and Self-Striping only)
Real hand-dyed yarn almost never has perfectly sharp color boundaries — when a dyer paints one color next to another on a skein, the dyes wick into each other a little, creating a softened transition zone. The Bleed option simulates this.
Turn on the Bleed checkbox to soften the hard edges between color blocks
Use the slider to control how wide the bleed zone is, as a percentage of your repeat length
The bleed is symmetric — centered on each color boundary, half on each side
Set to 0% (or leave the checkbox off) for perfectly sharp transitions, like a machine-printed yarn
Example: With Bleed enabled at 10% and a repeat of 30 cells, each color boundary has a 3-cell zone where the two colors blend smoothly into each other. The rest of each color block stays solid.
A few percent is usually enough for a subtle, realistic look. Larger values (20–30%) produce a softer, more painterly effect that blurs the distinction between your color blocks.
Below, the first image is with the Bleed disabled, the second has Bleed set to 5%.
Blend Ratio (Heathered and Marled only)
Controls the mix between the two colors:
0.5: Even 50/50 mix
Lower values: More of the first color
Higher values: More of the second color
How Each Type Distributes Color
Space-Dyed and Self-Striping
Each color gets a solid block. The block runs from its position to the next color's position. The last color extends to the end of the repeat.
For example, with three colors at positions 0.00, 0.33, and 0.66:
Color 1 fills 0% to 33%
Color 2 fills 33% to 66%
Color 3 fills 66% to 100%
Tip: To give each color equal space, distribute the stops evenly. Use the distribute evenly button (⇔) in the editor.
Tip: Turn on Bleed (see above) to soften the boundaries between color blocks, matching how real hand-dyed yarns actually look.
Ombre
Colors blend smoothly from one stop to the next. Each color is at full strength at its stop position and transitions gradually to the next color in between.
Tip: To create a repeating ombre that loops smoothly, add a copy of your first color at position 1.0. For example: Red at 0.0, Blue at 0.5, Red at 1.0.
Heathered
A random speckle of two colors. Only the first two color stops matter — additional stops are ignored. The pattern looks like a tweedy, salt-and-pepper texture. Stop positions and repeat length don't apply to this type.
Below is an example of a Heathered yarn configuration and how it would render given those settings.
Marled
An alternating checkerboard of two colors with slight random variation, simulating twisted plies. Like heathered, only the first two color stops are used. The alternation pattern gives it a distinctive plied-yarn character.
Show/Hide Toggle
For large projects, rendering variegated colors on every thread can slow things down. You can turn it on or off:
Ribbon: View tab > Show Variegated checkbox
macOS menu: View > Show Variegated Yarns
When turned off, all yarns display as their base solid color. Variegation is enabled by default.
File Compatibility
Variegation is saved in
.wiffiles as a custom section. Other weaving software will simply ignore it and show solid colors — your files remain fully compatible..twafiles (TempoWeave archives) preserve variegation inside their embedded WIF.Catalog yarns keep their variegation profile, and it transfers automatically when you add the yarn to a project.
Quick-Start Example
Let's say you have a hand-painted warp yarn that goes Blue → Green → Gold in repeating segments:
Open the Yarn Catalog, create or select your yarn
Set the type to Space-Dyed
Add three color stops:
Blue at position 0.00
Green at position 0.33
Gold at position 0.66
Set Repeat Length to 20 (each color block spans about 7 threads)
Add the yarn to your project palette and assign it to the warp
Click the Warp button next to the Thread Offset spinner to auto-calculate the diagonal shift (this button is enabled once the yarn is assigned to a project)
Check the drawdown — you'll see the color blocks flowing diagonally across your cloth, just as they would on the real loom
Note the variegation on the weft as well as the tri-color block in Active Palette.
Base Color
Important: when setting up your Variegated Yarn, you will still have a base color ("Current" color) that you will need to select which will show if you if you turn off "Show Variegated" in the View menu. This base color will also be the color shown in other Weave Design software, most Dobby systems, as well as TempoTreadle 1 and 2. So if when using Dobby or TempoTreadle, in order to get color change alerts, you must ensure that your base colors are different for each variegated yarn you are using.
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