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The guide

Knotting a friendship bracelet

Setting up strands, tying knots, reading a chart and knowing what length to cut.

What changes compared to beads

One thing only, but it drives everything else: you do not lay a color, you tie a knot. The color that appears follows from the strands arriving at that knot, and those strands come from everything tied above it.

You see the consequence on the first try: changing a knot halfway down the chart repaints everything below it. That is not a side effect, it is what the real bracelet does, where the thread you just moved carries on downwards.

The rest of the editor is the bead one. Zoom, hand, rotation, selection, copy-paste, history, 3D preview and saving all work exactly the same way, and the previous page describes them.

Setting up the strands

The left panel shows the warp: one thread per row, numbered, with its starting color. Half the bracelet is decided here, since every color in the pattern comes down from it.

The left panel. The chart sits at the top, under “Palette”: it lays down no thread, it supplies the colors the warp then uses. Each row opens on its colors.

Three ways to compose it, from the finest to the broadest.

  • One thread at a time: click its number, pick a color. The popover stays open, because recoloring repaints the whole bracelet and you try a few shades before settling.
  • Set up the strands composes a whole row: a sequence of colors, a spread in stripes (the sequence repeats thread by thread) or blocks (each color takes one contiguous band), and a mirrored checkbox. A preview shows the result before you apply it.
  • Ready-made warps, in the menu on the same button group, lay down the palettes offered at creation. “Reverse the strands” lives there too.

The “mirrored” checkbox is not decoration: it is what a chevron needs, and a symmetric warp is the kind of thing you hold in your head and get wrong. On sixteen threads, the eleventh must take the color of the sixth, which nobody checks by eye.

The Chart button opens the 775 DMC references, in two ranges the panel switches between: stranded cotton and soft cotton. As on the bead side, it lays down nothing: it feeds the available colors, which the warp then uses. And nothing forces a bracelet to stick to one brand.

Careful, a warp change cannot be undone with Mod+Z: no cell moves, it is the warp that changes. That is why “Set up the strands” shows a preview and asks for an explicit click.

Tying the knots

The default tool is called Lay a color, and it is the only one that speaks the language of the person making the thing: click on the side of the thread whose color you want, and the knot follows.

Two threads arrive at each cell, so there are two possible colors. The half you click picks which of the two shows.

Click on the left: the purple thread ties, and its color is the one that shows.
Click on the right: the gold thread ties, and the knot takes its color.

Look at the threads below the knot: they come out swapped. That is what a crossing knot does, and it is what decides the colors of the rows below.

One thing the click cannot say remains: whether the threads should cross or stay put. Motifil crosses by default, because published patterns overwhelmingly do, and clicking the same side again switches to the double knot, which lets the threads run straight down.

The four knots are in the toolbar too, on keys 1 to 4. Their buttons carry the glyph the chart draws in the cells, so what you read on the pattern can be found in the toolbar.

All four start from the same threads: purple on the left, gold on the right. Only the output changes.

Forward knotThe threads cross
Backward knotThe threads cross
Forward-backwardThe threads stay put
Backward-forwardThe threads stay put

So two knots give the same color, and what separates them is invisible on the colored cell: it is where the threads go, and therefore everything below.

The left half. Laying a color and the four knots share one group: they are the ways of filling a cell.

You do not have to memorise that table: hover a cell before clicking, and the editor shows the knot there in its real color. You look instead of working it out, which is the only sensible option when the answer depends on every row above.

The eraser and the eyedropper are there too, in the same place as in the bead editor.

The two ways of reading the pattern

The Show strands button (key F) switches between two notations of the same bracelet.

  • As strands: ribbons run down, cross at the knots, and each knot is a disc carrying its arrow. This is the notation used by pattern sites, and it is the one that shows why a knot has its color.
  • As cells: each knot is a colored square with an arrow. It is denser, so a long bracelet can be taken in at a glance.

Row numbers border the pattern in both views, and stay upright even if you rotate the view.

The right half. The waves button switches to the strand view; the arrow one is held down to see the colors alone.

Hold the A key, or the Hide arrows button, to see the colors alone, that is, what the bracelet will look like once knotted. It is deliberately a button you hold rather than a toggle: a pattern without its arrows is pretty and impossible to knot.

As you zoom out, the strand view folds back to cells: four ribbons crossing within eight pixels are just a smudge. A badge says so above the pattern. Turning the strand view back on therefore zooms in to the level where it is readable.

Length and number of strands

The Size button opens the two frame settings.

Rows are always added at the bottom. A bracelet is set up at the top and knotted downwards: rows inserted at the head would come before everything already tied and would repaint the whole pattern.

The Repeat the motif toggle extends the weave by copying the last knotted rows down to the bottom. It is the very gesture of a bracelet, knotted without knowing its final length.

Strands are set in steps of two, since a column of knots uses two of them. The pattern stays anchored on the left and strands are added on the right, taking the color of the last one. Anything lost by shrinking is counted beforehand, and the operation undoes.

Flipping the weave

The Flip the weave button mirrors the selection, or the whole pattern when nothing is selected. It transforms the knots as it moves them: the reflection of a forward knot is a backward knot, since the thread giving the color changes side.

Two accepted limits. The warp does not move: the full mirror image also needs “Reverse the strands”, in the warp panel. And there is no vertical mirror, because a knot’s color comes from everything above it: flipping the rows does not flip the picture, it gives a different bracelet.

What to cut

The Thread lengths panel, at the bottom right, gives for each thread, in warp order, its knot count and the length to allow for. It exports to CSV.

This is the calculation a bracelet really needs, and it rests on an asymmetry: in a knot, the thread that wraps is the one whose color shows, and it is the one being used up; the other runs down without wear. A candy stripe therefore uses one thread far more than its neighbours, and cutting every strand the same length wastes on one side while coming up short on the other.

The knot count is exact. The length is an estimate: it depends on thread thickness and how tightly you pull. It includes a working margin to hold the piece and tie off the ends.

The 3D preview

Key P shows the bracelet as it will be once knotted. It is not the chart wrapped around a cylinder: each knot is a slanted bump, and it is those bumps end to end that make the diagonal grain of a real bracelet, the thing neither the cell view nor the strand view shows.

Shortcuts

Key Effect
B lay a color
1 to 4 the four knots
E I S H eraser, eyedropper, selection, hand
F show strands
A (held) hide arrows
R 0 + - rotate, fit to screen, zoom
P 3D preview
Mod+Z / Mod+Shift+Z undo, redo
Mod+C Mod+X Mod+V Del copy, cut, paste, clear