Getting started with Motifil

Two studios in one app

Motifil is made to design two things, and both work the same way: a grid, a palette, and the drawing appearing one cell at a time.

On one side, bead patterns, woven on a loom, in brick or peyote stitch, or ironed, using Miyuki, TOHO, Hama, Perler and ArtKal references. On the other, friendship bracelets, knotted thread by thread, with the four usual knots and the DMC floss chart.

These are two distinct kinds of project. You pick which one when you create it, and that choice stays: a bracelet never turns into a bead pattern, because the cells do not mean the same thing. Everything else is shared between the two, backups, sharing and the 3D view included.

One thing before you start: Motifil is made for a computer screen. The editor lays the grid, the palette and its panels side by side, and a phone screen has no room to hold them.

Your projects live in this browser

There is no account to create and no server behind Motifil. Your projects are saved in the local database of the browser you work in, and they never leave it on their own.

That is what makes the app free and usable offline. It is also worth knowing from day one, because three things follow from it.

• A project created on one machine does not show up on another. The browser on your desktop and the one on your laptop are two separate databases, and moving from Firefox to Chrome on the same machine amounts to the same thing. To make a pattern travel, export it or send yourself a share link.
• Clearing your browser data erases your projects. One slightly broad cache cleanup, one private window closed, and nothing is left: there is no bin and no copy anywhere else.
• The backup is yours to keep. The menu on the projects screen exports the whole database as a single JSON file, which you store wherever you like and reload whenever you want.

Get into the habit of exporting now and then, especially before switching machines or cleaning up your browser. It is the only safety net there is, and it fits in one file.

Start with an example

Below the project list sit seven finished patterns: four bead patterns and three bracelets, including candy stripe, chevron and arrows. They are there because a blank grid shows very little, and because a knot chart is not something you can guess at if you have never read one.

Clicking an example opens it like any other project: you can edit it, repaint it, make it bigger. It becomes yours at that moment, and nothing is written before that. If you would rather get the original pattern back, its card menu offers “Reset to original”.

It is the fastest way to see what the editor can do, before creating anything of your own.

Create a bead pattern

On the projects screen, the Bead pattern card opens the creation form. You give it a name, then answer three questions, in this order.

1. The stitch

The stitch is what you already know how to do with a needle: loom, brick, peyote, and their 2 or 3 drop variants. Each card shows a small piece of grid, which says more than a name: it is the repeat of the motif that tells a 2 drop from a 3 drop.

Stitches are grouped into two families, seed beads and fuse beads. The stitch you pick decides the family, and therefore which catalogs you will be offered next.

2. The material

The catalog gives the shape of a bead, in millimetres: its diameter and its length. This is not a display detail. A Delica 11/0 is 1.6 mm across for 1.3 mm long, a round seed bead is nearly spherical, a fuse bead is square. Which way it lies is decided by the stitch: on a loom the thread runs along the row, so the bead is taller than it is wide; in brick stitch it is sewn upright, and it is the other way round. The grid on screen takes those proportions, and so does the finished piece.

3. The size

The number of rows and columns, from 1 to 500 on each side. The right-hand panel follows what you type and shows the whole grid, the number of beads to string, and the real size of the piece. The cm button in the header switches those lengths to inches, here as well as in a bracelet’s thread-length panel.

You can also start from an image: Motifil then suggests a size based on its proportions and converts the photo into a pattern, matched to the colors actually available in the catalog you chose. The number of colors is adjusted later in the editor, with a preview.

The stitch and the catalog cannot be changed after creation: they are what draw the grid. The name, the description and the size can.

Create a friendship bracelet

The second card, Friendship bracelet, opens the same form with different questions, because a bracelet is not described the way a bead pattern is.

1. The strands

How many threads you set up, an even number between 4 and 64. This is what gives the bracelet its width: it takes two strands to make a knot, so a 16 thread bracelet is 8 knots wide. The number of strands cannot be changed after creation.

2. The warp

The order of the colors across the threads at the start, before the first knot. Six ready-made warps are offered, and each thumbnail shows the real warp with the number of strands you just entered: you choose by eye, without needing to know what a symmetric layout is.

These warps are named after their colors, not after a motif, and that is deliberate: the grid you get is empty. A symmetric warp is needed for a chevron, but it does not knot it for you.

3. The length

The length of the bracelet, counted in rows of knots. As with beads, the preview on the right shows the result and counts the knots to tie.

In a bracelet, a knot’s color is not chosen: it comes from the strands arriving at it. That is why changing one knot halfway down the chart repaints everything below it. The knot editor has its own page in this guide.

What gets saved on its own

There is nothing to save by hand while you draw. Every bead placed and every knot changed goes into the browser database a fraction of a second after your gesture, and the projects screen shows the last edit date.

What you do have to do is export now and then: that is the only action that puts your patterns somewhere other than this one browser.

Take Motifil offline

Motifil can be installed. Depending on your browser, an install icon appears in the address bar, or the option sits in its menu, under “Install” or “Create shortcut”.

Once installed, the app opens from your desktop, in its own window, with no address bar, and works with no connection. That fits the rest: everything is already in your browser, there is nothing to fetch over the network in order to draw.

Two things to know. An app update downloads in the background and offers to reload: it waits patiently while you are drawing. And this guide lives on the website and does need a connection, unlike the editor.