User Manual

A living guide to using TideStitch. Current as of version 1.5; sections grow as features land.

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What TideStitch is

TideStitch lets you audition real fabric in real blocks before you cut a single piece. You photograph your fabrics, drop them into a quilt block, and see them tiled at true scale, so a 6″ swatch in a 12″ block repeats the way it actually would in cloth. It's built for iPad first, runs on iPhone and Mac, and (once iCloud is set up) syncs your stash and designs across your devices. The Mac version is the same app with a few desktop touches, see Using TideStitch on Mac.

There are four places to work, shown as a sidebar on Mac and as a tab bar along the bottom on iPad and iPhone:

• Stash: your fabric library of individual swatches and jelly rolls.
• Designs: the quilts you're building, where you decide what to make.
• Patterns: the same quilts as cut lists and sewing instructions, ready to carry to the cutting table.
• Settings: app-wide quilting preferences like seam allowance and cutting mode.

Everything you do saves automatically. There's no save button to remember, and most edits can be undone.

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Getting started

When you first open the app, both the Stash and Designs tabs are empty (the Designs tab seeds a few starter quilts, see below). The usual path is: add a fabric or two to your Stash, then start a Design and paint those fabrics into a block. You can also go fabric-first with a jelly roll: declare the roll, photograph its strips, and the app suggests patterns that fit what you have, including a full Bargello designer. Or start from scratch with a Design Your Own board and rough out your own layout with the drawing tools.

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Using TideStitch on Mac

TideStitch runs on Mac as the same app you use on iPad, so your whole stash and every design behave exactly the same, and (with iCloud on) sync across your Mac, iPad, and iPhone. The rest of this manual applies as written; a handful of things just adapt to a desktop with a pointer and keyboard:

• A sidebar instead of a bottom tab bar. The four sections (Stash, Designs, Patterns, Settings) sit in a left sidebar on Mac, rather than the bottom tab bar you'd see on iPad and iPhone.
• Click instead of tap. Everywhere the manual says "tap," click with the mouse or trackpad. "Tap a swatch, then tap the patch" becomes click, then click.
• Control-click to delete. Where iPad uses press-and-hold to bring up Delete on a swatch, jelly roll, or design, on Mac you Control-click (or right-click) the card instead. The same confirmation dialog appears, and deletes are still permanent.
• No camera, add from your library. A Mac has no rear camera, so the Take Photo option is hidden. Adding fabric starts from your photo library: Choose One (crop it) is the main button, with Add Several from Library for bulk import. Everything after that (the square crop, the details, the real-world size) is identical to iPad.
• Hover to preview. Move the pointer over a swatch, block thumbnail, or design and it lifts slightly with an accent ring, so you can see what you're about to click.
• Zoom with the buttons or keyboard. Trackpad pinch isn't reliable on Mac, so the canvas zoom cluster stays visible above the quilt. It's wired to the standard Mac shortcuts: ⌘− zoom out, ⌘0 zoom to fit, ⌘= (⌘+) zoom in, ⌘9 actual size, and (for long quilts) ⌘8 fit width and ⌘R quarter turn.
• Undo and redo from the keyboard. ⌘Z undoes your last change and ⌘⇧Z redoes it, in the design editor and on freeform boards, matching the Undo button in the toolbar.
• A resizable window. Drag the window to whatever size suits you; it won't shrink below a minimum that would break the layout.

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The Stash tab

The Stash holds two kinds of fabric: loose fabric swatches and jelly rolls. A segmented control at the top switches between them (Fabrics, shown first, and Jelly Rolls), and each fills the full width as a scrolling grid. The ＋ New button just under the control is context-aware: it adds a swatch on the Fabrics tab and a jelly roll on the Jelly Rolls tab.

Adding a fabric swatch

1. With Fabrics selected, tap ＋ New.
2. Choose how to bring in the photo:
   • Take Photo: use the camera.
   • Choose One (crop it): pick a single photo and frame it yourself in the swatch editor.
   • Add Several from Library: multi-select as many photos as you like at once; each is auto-cropped to a square. This is the fast way to load a lot of fabric.
3. For a single photo, you land in the swatch editor (see below): frame the crop, name it, set its real-world size, tune the color if you need to, and optionally categorize it.
4. Tap Save.

When you Add Several from Library, the batch comes in uncategorized; tag each swatch afterward from its details.

The swatch editor

Adding, editing, recropping, replacing, and color-correcting a swatch all happen on one screen now, instead of the separate crop modal and details form earlier versions used. It lays itself out for the room it's in: a wide photo with a control rail beside it on a landscape iPad, phone, or roomy Mac window; a photo across the top with the controls below on a portrait iPad; and one stacked column on a portrait phone or a narrow window. On every platform it fills the whole screen, so the photo you're cropping is never smaller than the preview of it.

• Crop. Drag the box over the fabric and slide to resize it. What's inside the box becomes your swatch. A tile preview shows that crop repeated, so you can see how it reads as yardage before you commit.
• Name it (e.g. "Blue floral").
• Real-world size: how many inches across the photo represents (1″–18″). This is what makes the tiling scale correctly later, so it's worth getting roughly right.
• Color: three sliders, Exposure, Contrast, and Saturation, to make a badly lit photo read like the real cloth. Reset color puts them back to neutral. It's deliberately just three, enough to fix the lighting, not a darkroom.
• Replace photo: reshoot or re-pick the fabric without minting a new one. Because it stays the same swatch, every design already using it just recolors itself. (When adding, the same button reads Use a different photo.)
• Category: Base color, Material, and Print style. All three are optional and default to None, they just make a big stash easier to filter later (see Filtering the stash).

Editing or deleting a swatch

Tap any swatch to reopen the swatch editor, where you can reframe the crop, rename it, adjust its real-world size, tune Exposure/Contrast/Saturation, Replace photo, or set its categories. Renaming or recategorizing never re-encodes the photo, so it won't cause every quilt using that fabric to redraw; only a new photo, a moved crop, or a color adjustment does that (and that's exactly what makes those designs pick up the change).

Because fabric is drawn at true scale, the real-world size directly changes how large the print reads in your blocks: size a swatch to match its patch and it shows as one clean piece instead of a repeat.

Once a swatch has a base color, a small colour dot appears in the corner of its stash tile so the stash reads at a glance.

To delete a swatch, press and hold it, choose Delete, and confirm in the dialog that appears; deletes are permanent and can't be undone, so the confirmation guards against a stray tap.

Filtering the stash

Once your stash grows, use the filter row above the swatch grid to narrow it:

• Tap one or more colour dots to show only those base colours. Tap again to unselect.
• Use the Type menu to filter by Material and/or Print style (each entry is a checkmark toggle).
• Filters combine sensibly: within one axis, matches are ORed (Red or Blue); across axes they're ANDed (Blue and Batik). A count on Type shows how many material/print filters are active.
• Tap Clear to reset to the whole stash. If a filter hides everything, the grid shows "No fabrics match, tap to clear."

Swatches with nothing set are Uncategorized: they show whenever no filter is active, and are hidden only once you filter on an axis they don't have.

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Jelly rolls

A jelly roll is a bundle of pre-cut fabric strips (classically 2.5″ wide). TideStitch treats it as its own thing because the patterns you'd make from it are strip-based.

Creating a jelly roll

1. In the Stash, switch to the Jelly Rolls tab and tap ＋ New.
2. You land on the jelly roll's detail screen. Set:
   • Name
   • Strips: how many strips are in the roll (1–80).
   • Strip width: usually 2.5″ (1″–4″).
   • Strip length: typically around 42–44″ (20″–60″).

Photographing strips

In the Strips section, tap Add. The photo flow is the same as for swatches, except photos are cropped to a long rectangle and scaled so the strip's width renders at true size. Photograph as many strips as you like; the header tracks "X of Y photographed." You don't have to shoot every strip to start designing (though Bargello wants at least six, see below).

Starting a design from a jelly roll

Once you've photographed at least one strip, tap New design from this jelly roll. This opens the pattern picker (see below).

To delete a jelly roll, press and hold its card in the Stash, choose Delete, and confirm; this removes the roll and all its strips, and can't be undone.

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The Designs tab

This is the list of quilts you're building, newest activity first. Tap a design to open it; swipe left to delete. Press and hold a card (Control-click on Mac) for a menu to Rename or Delete it without opening it.

Gallery and list views

Designs shows as a Gallery of picture cards by default, because you know your own quilt by looking at it. Tap the view menu in the top-right corner to switch to List (a row per design with a mini-render, name, and size) and back. The Patterns tab has the same toggle, and each tab remembers its own choice, so you can browse Designs as pictures and Patterns as a list if that's how you work.

Starter designs

When you first open TideStitch, your Designs tab already has a few ready-made quilts (a Nine-Patch, an Ohio Star, and a Log Cabin) so you have something to explore right away. These are marked read-only: open one and you can look at it, view its pattern, and see how it's put together, but the editing tools are hidden and a lock badge reads "Starter design, read-only." Tap Duplicate to Edit (in the toolbar or on the banner) to make your own copy you can paint and change freely.

Don't want them? Just swipe left to delete any you don't need; they won't come back, and they only ever seed into a brand-new, empty library.

Starting a block design

1. Tap ＋ ("New design").
2. Pick a block from the grid of thumbnails. It's a growing library of traditional blocks, including Pinwheel, Sawtooth Star, Broken Dishes, Friendship Star, Ohio Star, Hunter's Star, Log Cabin, Nine-Patch, Four-Patch, Shoo Fly, Churn Dash, Jacob's Ladder, Bear Paw, Anvil, Birds in the Air, Flying Dutchman, Double X, Cat's Cradle, Missouri Puzzle, Cactus Bud, Tide Line, Laurie's Bear Paw, Rising Sun, Rocky Glen, Clay's Choice, Lady of the Lake, and Cross and Crown, plus two blank canvases: the HST Grid (a half-square-triangle field you size and colour freely) and Squares (a plain one-patch grid of squares).
3. Set the finished size of one block (4″–24″). (The HST Grid and Squares have their own controls instead; see below.)
4. Optionally choose a Setting (Straight, On point, or Brick, see Setting below) and name it, then tap Create. The editor opens.

Sizing an HST Grid

When you pick the HST Grid, the size slider is replaced by a small set of controls:

• HSTs across and HSTs down (2–24 each) set how many half-square triangles make up the grid (default 8×8).
• Size by lets you choose how the size is defined:
  • Each HST: set the finished size of a single triangle unit (1″–8″).
  • Whole top: set the finished width of the entire grid (12″–120″) and the unit size is worked out for you.
• The footer shows the live math: each HST's finished size, what it squares up (cuts) to using your current seam allowance, and the finished width × height of the whole top.

Sizing a Squares one-patch

When you pick Squares, the size slider is replaced by controls for a plain grid of squares:

• Each square (finished) sets the finished size of one square (1″–12″). Its cut size is that plus a seam allowance on every edge, a 3″ square cuts at 3½″ with a ¼″ seam.
• Size by lets you drive the grid two ways:
  • Grid count: set how many squares across and down (1–40 each). The finished top is simply the count times the square size, 10 × 12 at 3″ makes a 30″ × 36″ top of 120 squares.
  • Target size: enter a target width and height, and the app offers the two whole-square sizes that bracket each target, the multiple just below and just above, so you never end up with a partial square. It preselects whichever lands nearest (a tie picks the smaller, to save fabric). Pick one per dimension and the footer shows the exact landed size before you create.
• The footer always shows the landed top size, the cut size per square, and the total count.

Starting a jelly-roll design (the pattern picker)

When you start from a jelly roll, instead of picking a block you pick a pattern. The picker is fabric-first: every pattern shows a thumbnail, a short description, and how it fits your roll:

• "Uses N of your Y strips" when you have enough (jelly-roll patterns are answered in strips, not yardage, because you already own the fabric).
• "Needs N strips (you have Y)" in red, and the row is dimmed and unselectable, when you don't.

That way you can see what a pattern would cost even if you can't make it yet. The current patterns are Bargello (a full wave designer, see Bargello below), Jelly Roll Race, Rail Fence, Strip Twist, and Strip Patchwork. Tap one to create the design and jump into the editor (Bargello first walks you through building a gradient and shaping a wave).

Rail Fence, Strip Twist, and Strip Patchwork take a size. Open Layout in the editor and set the Quilt size: blocks (or squares) across and down, independently. Your painted fabrics follow the blocks when you resize; shrinking drops the fabrics on any blocks outside the new grid, tells you how many, and can be undone.

Starting a Design Your Own board

The ＋ button is a menu: alongside New design it has Design Your Own, a freehand board you draw on yourself instead of picking a ready-made block. See Design Your Own (freeform boards) below for the full walkthrough. Setup asks for:

1. A cell size, the size of one square cell (2″–12″). Cells are always square, so the whole top is a clean grid of squares.
2. A grid, how many columns and rows (2–48 each). The footer shows the finished top size that makes (e.g. 10 × 12 squares of 6″ → a 60″ × 72″ top).
3. Optionally, a Setting of Straight or On point (an on-point board becomes a center medallion, see below), an optional name, then Create.

Boards always start in Grid mode; you can switch to Radial once you're in.

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The design editor

This is where the actual designing happens. The block (or quilt, or strip pattern) is rendered up top; the tools sit on a labeled shelf under it, and the palette runs along the bottom (or down one side, see below). A readout above the canvas shows the finished size (e.g. "Finished: 12″ × 12″"); for jelly-roll designs it instead reminds you how many strips the pattern uses.

Zooming in to place fabric

Pinch to zoom into the canvas and drag with one finger to pan around, which is handy for getting precise on small patches. A zoom cluster sits at the end of the size readout, just above the quilt, so it never covers a patch you're painting: − zoom out, fit (zoom to fit the whole design), ＋ zoom in, and ruler (actual size, the design drawn at its true physical dimensions against a calibrated screen). On a long quilt it grows to six, adding fit width and quarter turn (see below).

Filling a wide screen (fit width and quarter turn)

A long, narrow quilt on a wide screen used to sit as a strip down the middle with empty gutters on either side. Two controls in the zoom cluster spend that space, and appear only when they'd actually make the design bigger:

• Fit width (the left-right arrows) scales the design until it spans the canvas, then scrolls; drag up and down to see the rest. It's a mode, so it survives opening the palette.
• Quarter turn (the rotate icon) turns the view a quarter turn so a tall design lies across a wide screen. It tints when it's on; tap again to stand it back up.

Both change only what you're looking at, never the quilt. The size readout, the cut list, the sew order, and the exported PDF all stay exactly the same whether the view is turned or not, and the designs-list thumbnail always draws upright. Both controls are on the paint canvas and on the Line and compass canvases of a Design Your Own board.

The core move: load the brush, then paint

Everything works the same way:

1. Tap a colour or fabric swatch in the palette to load it onto your brush. A highlighted ring shows what's loaded, and a hint line under the canvas tells you what will happen. (Loading a chip only arms the brush, it never paints on its own.)
2. Tap a patch to fill it. Each tap fills one patch, which keeps you precise on busy blocks.

To swap a fabric, just load a different one and paint over what's there. To erase, load the Clear (eraser) chip and tap patches to empty them.

The tool rail and the More menu

The tools live on a labeled shelf (the tool rail) between the quilt and the palette, with words on them, not just icons. One is active at a time:

• Paint: the default, load the brush and tap patches to fill them.
• Rotate: turn a block or an HST unit (see Rotating blocks).
• Merge: join same-fabric patches to cut as one piece (see Merging patches).
• Swap: replace one fabric with another everywhere it appears in the design.

Past a divider, a document zone holds three buttons that open sheets rather than paint: Background (its icon is the current ground swatch), Borders, and Layout.

The Swap tool is worth calling out: load it, tap a patch wearing the fabric you want to gone, then tap its replacement in the palette, and it repaints every patch (including sashing and pieced borders) that carried the old fabric. Before you commit, it counts and highlights exactly what will change. If you tap a patch that's showing the design's Background color rather than a fabric you painted, it tells you so and points you at the Background control, since background looks identical on screen but isn't a painted fill.

Up in the top toolbar are just Undo, Redo, a one-tap Pattern button (which folds into the More menu on a narrow phone), and the More (•••) menu.

On a phone, when you're in Paint or Rotate the shelf under the quilt collapses to hand those points back to the board; it stays put for Merge and Swap, whose whole job is tapping patches. That one animated change when you switch to Merge or Swap is on purpose, not the board twitching.

The palette

The palette is split into collapsible sections: Blocks (quilt layouts only), Colors, and Fabrics (or Strips for jelly-roll designs). Tap a section's header chevron to collapse it and give the canvas more room; the app remembers which sections you've collapsed.

When the editor is wider than it is tall (a landscape phone or iPad, or a wide Mac window), the palette stands beside the quilt instead of under it, and its chips wrap into a grid so your whole stash is reachable rather than scrolling sideways forever. Stacked under the quilt, the palette has a handle (labeled Palette, carrying whatever brush is loaded) with three positions: tap to open or shut it; and on a phone or portrait iPad, drag the handle down from shut to send the whole band off the bottom edge, leaving just a small pill that brings it back. That hands almost the entire screen to the quilt when you want to just look.

Background is no longer a palette row, it's the Background button on the tool rail's document zone (its icon is the current ground). It sets the block's background in one tap, the light, recessive areas like the field behind a star or the background triangle of every HST cell. Pick None, mix a Custom colour, or choose any fabric from your stash. It's a design-wide setting, not a brush: change it and every background piece you haven't painted individually updates at once, while patches you have painted keep their own fill.

In the Colors row, from left to right: the Clear eraser, a Custom colour picker (tap to mix or type any colour by hex), a row of preset solid colours, and the color-family dots that open the browser (see below). The Fabrics row shows your full Stash for block designs, or just this roll's strips for jelly-roll designs. If it's empty, the app points you back to the Stash to add fabric.

When your stash is large, the Fabrics row has its own Filter line (tap to expand it). It works exactly like the stash filter, colour dots plus a Type menu for material and print style, but only narrows what shows in that row, so you can paint from just your blues, or just your batiks, without scrolling past everything. The count on Filter shows how many filters are active; tap Clear (or the "No fabrics match" line) to reset. Jelly-roll strips aren't filtered.

Browsing for a color

The row of preset solids is 25 curated colors, enough to reach for fast, not enough for the exact dusty teal you have in mind. That's what the color-family dots are for. Tap a family (Reds & pinks, Greens, Blues & teals, and so on) and it opens:

• A ladder of nine tints and shades of that family, light to dark.
• A Hue strip to slide toward a neighbor (drag Blue toward Green for the teal between them).
• A Tone strip from Vivid to Dusty, for how saturated or low-volume you want it.

Neutrals (white, cream, grays, black) open just the light-to-dark ladder, since they've no hue or saturation to move. Pick any swatch to load it on the brush. Nothing here is written to the design until you paint, and if you already know the exact color, the Custom picker takes a hex code directly.

Undo, rename, and clearing

• Undo and Redo: the curved-arrow buttons in the top toolbar. Undo reverses your last change (painting, resizing, clearing, and so on); Redo puts it back. Each is greyed out when there's nothing to undo or redo. On a keyboard they're ⌘Z and ⌘⇧Z.
• The More menu (the ••• button) holds:
  • Rename: type a new name and tap Save.
  • Clear All Fills: removes every colour and fabric in the design (the block shapes stay). It asks for confirmation first, and you can undo it.
  • On a narrow phone, Pattern lives here too (on wider screens it's a button in the toolbar).

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Colorways

A colorway is the same design in a different set of fabrics. Rather than duplicating a whole quilt to try navy-and-cream against the same blocks in scrappy brights, you keep one design and give it several colorways, then flip between them or set two side by side.

The Colorways strip sits below the canvas. The first chip is your base colorway (named for the design); tap New colorway to add one, which copies the colorway you're looking at so you have something to recolor. Switch between them by tapping a chip. The selected chip carries a ••• menu with:

• Rename: give the colorway its own name.
• Make Its Own Design: promote it to a standalone quilt in the Designs tab (the colorway stays here too).
• Delete: remove it (the base colorway can only be renamed, since deleting it would be deleting the quilt).

The usual flow is: tap New colorway, then use the Swap tool on the copy to audition different fabrics. Swap only touches the colorway you're viewing, so the original is untouched. A footnote reminds you which parts are shared by every colorway (sashing, cornerstones, setting triangles, and the background), so recoloring those in one changes them everywhere.

Tap Compare to see colorways side by side on the Compare colorways screen. It opens with two selected; a chip row up top lets you swap which ones are shown, and an Arrangement menu (Automatic, Side by side, Stacked, One at a time) lets you overrule how they're laid out. On a phone or a tablet held upright it shows one at a time, full width, with a segmented switch, press and hold a board to peek at the other.

Colorways work on every kind of quilt, block grids (straight, on point, or brick), HST and Squares grids, the jelly-roll patterns, and Design Your Own boards. The one exception is Bargello, whose colors come from the wave recipe rather than painted patches.

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Building bigger quilts (block designs)

A single block is just the start. Most block designs can be tiled into a full quilt grid. (Jelly-roll designs have no Layout button. The HST Grid and Squares have one, but it reopens their own unit-grid controls, across/down and unit size, rather than the rows × columns quilt grid below.)

Layout

Tap Layout (in the tool rail's document zone) to open the grid controls:

• Rows and Columns steppers (1–12 each) set the quilt's size in blocks. (Raised from 6, so a small block can still reach a bed-quilt size.)
• Block size stepper (4″–30″) sets the finished size of each block.
• A live readout shows the block count and the finished quilt dimensions (width × height).
• Fill new blocks from top-left (on by default): new cells mirror the top-left block and its fabrics, so growing the grid never leaves empty squares. It's a live mirror, not a one-time copy: paint any patch of a mirrored block and that block becomes its own, while the rest keep mirroring. Turn it off to leave new blocks blank and fill them yourself.

To turn one finished block into a whole quilt top, keep Fill new blocks from top-left on and bump the Rows and Columns; every new cell picks up your block automatically. From there you can vary individual cells (see below) or paint each block differently for a gradient effect. Everything you do in the Layout sheet (resizing the grid, changing block size, adding sashing) collapses into a single undo step, so one tap of Undo takes you back to where you started instead of unwinding row by row.

Sashing and cornerstones

Once a layout has more than one block, the Layout sheet adds a Sashing section, strips of fabric that sit between the blocks to set them apart (like a 2″ frame around every block):

• Sashing stepper: the strip width, from None up to 12″ in quarter-inch steps. Leave it at None for no sashing.
• Strip fabric: the fabric or colour for the sashing strips.
• Cornerstones toggle: turn it on to drop a small square wherever the strips cross; a Cornerstone fabric chip appears to fill those squares.
• The footer shows the finished top size before borders, and reminds you that you can tap any strip or cornerstone on the canvas to recolour it individually, just like a patch.

Sashing only shows for a straight, multi-block grid (a single block has nothing to sash between, and it isn't available on an on-point or brick set yet).

Setting: straight, on point, or brick

The Layout sheet (and the New design screen) has a Setting control with three choices for how the blocks sit in the quilt:

• Straight: blocks sit square to the quilt's edges. This is the default and everything above assumes it.
• On point: blocks turn 45° and are sewn in diagonal rows, with setting triangles squaring the edges. The same grid finishes about 1.41× (√2) bigger. Two extra pickers appear: Blocks between (what fills the plain alternate slots between the diamonds, Same as main block, Plain square, or any block) and Edges (what fills the setting triangles, Same as main block, Plain triangles, or any block). If the edges are plain rather than pieced, a Setting triangle fabric chip appears. The cut list gives you the real side-setting and corner triangles in the right shapes, with grain notes and the squares to cut them from.
• Brick: blocks stay square but stagger like brickwork. Stagger picks whether Columns or Rows get pushed along; Drop picks how far, Half a block, a Third, or a Quarter. The quilt finishes exactly the size a straight set would, because the block missing from one end of a dropped line is the one hanging off the other; the overhang is trimmed back to a clean rectangle, and the blocks that cap a staggered line are part blocks, cut down, which the footer counts for you. It sews in full-length strips, no Y-seams, no partial seams, and no bias edge to stretch. (A brick set needs at least two columns or rows to have something to stagger against.)

Switching away from On point or Brick back toward a simpler set removes slots those sets added (the alternate blocks, or the part blocks), so the app asks first with a Change to… dialog before it clears them.

(Setting applies to block-grid quilts. HST grids, Squares grids, and jelly-roll patterns are one continuous field rather than a grid of blocks, so they have no Setting control. A Design Your Own board offers Straight or On point only, see A medallion.)

Mixing block types in one quilt

For quilt layouts, a Blocks row appears in the palette. Tap a block chip to load it, then tap a cell to turn that cell into that block. (Changing a cell's block clears that cell's fabrics, since the new block has different patches.) This lets you combine, say, stars and pinwheels in one quilt.

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Borders

Tap Borders (in the tool rail's document zone) to frame your design. Borders work on every design type: single blocks, full quilts, HST grids, and jelly-roll patterns. You can stack several, and they nest outward from the center field.

Managing borders

The Borders sheet lists your borders innermost-first:

• Add: tap ＋. A new border starts as a 2″ solid denim frame so you can see it right away.
• Reorder: tap Edit, then drag. Border 1 is the innermost (it touches the center); higher numbers sit further out.
• Remove: swipe a row left, or use Edit.

Tap a border to open its settings.

A single border's settings

• Width: 0.25″ to 12″, in quarter-inch steps.

• Side style: how the four sides are built:

  • Solid: plain strips in one fabric or colour (set by the Fill below).
  • Flying geese: a row of "geese" (triangle units) marching around the frame.
  • Sawtooth: a row of half-square-triangle "teeth" around the frame.

  For the pieced styles (Flying geese / Sawtooth), the units resize to fit each side; change the Width to change how many fit. A live readout shows the count, e.g. "Top & bottom: 8 geese · sides: 6." Pieced units come up blank and are painted on the canvas (see below), so there's no side-fill chip for them.

• Corner style: how the four corners are treated:

  • Butted: sides run straight past each other (the simplest frame).
  • Mitered: the corners meet on a 45° diagonal.
  • Corner squares: a plain square ("cornerstone") sits in each corner, with the sides running between them.
  • Corner blocks: a full quilt block sits in each corner; pick which block from the list that appears.

  Pieced sides have to run between corner pieces, so choosing Flying geese or Sawtooth offers only Corner squares and Corner blocks, and bumps butted/mitered corners up to squares automatically.

• Fill (labelled Side fill when the border has corner pieces): for solid sides, load the border's colour or fabric here. A solid border is a single fabric or colour across all four sides.

Painting pieced sides, corner squares, and corner blocks: these all come up blank. Paint them right on the canvas with your brush, exactly like the rest of the quilt: load a colour or fabric and tap the pieces. (A solid border's side strips use the Fill instead.)

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Rotating blocks

Every block design gets a Rotate tool on the tool rail (jelly-roll designs don't; their strips have a fixed orientation). It's context-aware:

• On a regular pieced block (Pinwheel, Log Cabin, Sawtooth Star, and so on), load Rotate and tap a block to turn the whole block 90° clockwise. Its fabrics ride along with the spin. Tap again to keep turning; four taps bring it back to where it started. In a tiled quilt, each cell rotates on its own, so you can spin individual blocks for pinwheel and windmill effects across the top.
• On an HST Grid (or any design using half-square triangles), Rotate instead spins the individual HST unit you tap, 90° at a time through all four orientations. That's how you build custom triangle layouts (pinwheels, zigzags, diamonds, and so on).

Rotate is tap-only (no dragging), so you can't accidentally spin a whole row.

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Merging patches (cut as one piece)

Sometimes a run of same-fabric patches should really be one piece of cloth, not a grid of little pieces sewn back together. A quilt's plain background is the classic case: if the whole lower-left of a block is one fabric, you'd cut it as a single large triangle, not piece it from a dozen half-square triangles. The Merge tool does exactly that.

Merge is on the tool rail for every design except jelly rolls. Load it and the canvas switches to selection mode:

1. Tap the patches you want to join. They have to be the same fabric or colour and actually touch each other. A running count shows how many you've picked; tap a selected patch again to drop it.
2. Tap Merge. The selected area becomes one shape: its internal seams disappear on the canvas, and in the pattern it's cut as a single piece. (A merged region draws in the one fabric it's cut from, with no seam line down the middle.)
3. If your selection isn't all the same fabric, or the pieces don't all connect, the app tells you and leaves them as they were, so you can't merge something you couldn't actually cut.

To split a merged area back into its patches, open the Merge tool, tap the merged shape, and choose Unmerge. Tap Done to leave the tool.

Merging changes the pattern, not just the picture: a merged region shows up in the cut list as one big square, rectangle, or triangle, and the assembly steps join it on as a late seam (see Making a pattern).

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Design Your Own (freeform boards)

A Design Your Own board is a blank quilt top you rough out yourself with constrained drawing tools, instead of starting from a fixed block. It has two modes, Grid and Radial, and a Grid / Radial switch sits just above the palette. The two modes don't mix: switching with anything on the board asks first, then clears it so you can start the new layout fresh.

Everything you draw is stored as a recipe (the grid size, your cell cuts, the compass anchor and its rays), not as baked-in shapes, so a board reopens exactly as you left it and always renders crisp. You fill regions the same way as any design: load a colour or fabric, tap to paint.

Note: freeform boards are for designing, they store and colour geometry, but don't generate a cut list or pattern yet. The Pattern option isn't offered on a freeform board.

Grid mode

The board is your finished top divided into the grid you chose. Two tools live in the toolbar:

Line (the diagonal-stroke icon) opens an edit view of the grid where you cut cells into regions. Your existing fills stay visible, faded, so you keep your bearings, and cutting a painted cell keeps the paint on both new pieces. Pinch to zoom and drag to pan (or use the zoom cluster) to work precisely on a fine grid. A row of buttons picks the kind of cut, and a tap makes it:

• Diagonal (╲╱), tap a cell near the corner-to-corner line you want; the nearer diagonal is drawn, splitting the cell into two triangles. Tap the same diagonal again to clear it.
• Across (↔), tap a cell to cut it straight across into top and bottom pieces. The cut lands on the nearest ¼″ mark, so pieces come out as real measurements (never a 1.11″ rectangle), and a small label shows each piece's size in inches. Add as many cuts as you like, two make three bands. Drag a cut to slide it to a new size, or tap it to remove it.
• Up-and-down (↕), the same, cutting a cell into left and right pieces.

Straight cuts and a diagonal are mutually exclusive in a cell, adding one replaces the other. Tap Done to go back to painting.

Merge works like the block editor's merge tool: tap touching regions, then Merge to cut them as one piece, or Unmerge to split them back. On a freeform board there's one rule, the pieces you pick have to form a single rectangle or triangle (a shape you can actually rotary-cut). An L-shape or other blob is refused with a nudge, so every merged piece stays cuttable. (See Merging patches above.)

To colour the board, leave both tools off, load a colour or fabric, and tap regions, whole cells, triangles, straight-cut bands, or merged pieces.

Radial mode

Radial mode turns the whole board into a single compass: one anchor point with rays fanning out to the edges, and the wedges between rays are your fillable regions. Two tools:

Anchor (the target icon), drag to place the compass point. By default it snaps to the nearest grid intersection; flip the Snap toggle off to drop it anywhere. Moving the anchor afterward just reshapes the wedges, your fills stay put.

Ray (the rays icon), drag outward from the anchor to add a ray. Rays snap to 7.5° increments by default (so you land clean 15°, 22.5°, 30°, 45°… angles), or turn Snap off for any angle. Tap an existing ray to remove it. You need at least two rays to split the board; with none or one, the whole top is a single region. As you add and remove rays, any wedges you've already coloured keep their colour, split a filled wedge and both halves stay filled.

Then, with the tools off, load a colour or fabric and tap wedges to fill them. Wedges correctly wrap the board's corners, so a corner wedge fills all the way out.

Merge works in radial mode too: load the Merge tool, tap neighbouring wedges (ones that share a ray), and tap Merge to fuse them into a single region, the seam between them disappears and they colour as one piece. Unmerge splits them back. Unlike Grid mode, there's no rectangle-or-triangle rule here: any run of touching wedges can merge, since a radial fan is one region you're colouring rather than a shape to rotary-cut. (See Merging patches above.)

A medallion (on-point board)

At setup (or later in the board's Layout), a Setting of On point turns the whole board 45° and squares it back up with corner triangles, like a center medallion. A turned rectangle always squares up to a square, so the finished quilt comes out square even when the board itself isn't. The footer spells out the finished size before you apply it.

Undoing and finishing

The Undo button (curved arrow) steps back your last action of any kind, a cut, a ray, an anchor move, a merge, a fill, even a mode switch (which clears the board, so Undo brings it right back). A Redo button sits beside it to put an undone action back. On a keyboard they're ⌘Z and ⌘⇧Z. Everything autosaves too; close and reopen and your board, geometry and fills come right back.

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Jelly-roll design tools

Jelly-roll designs get a Randomize button (top toolbar, the shuffle icon). It scrappy-fills every patch with a random strip from your roll, a fast way to get a lively, scrappy look you can then tweak by hand. It's disabled until you've photographed at least one strip.

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Bargello

A bargello turns a jelly roll into flowing waves of color: you sew the strips into a tube, slice it into columns, and offset each column a little so the colors ripple across the quilt. TideStitch designs the wave with you and works out the tube math. Start it from the jelly-roll pattern picker: tap Bargello (it's first in the list). You need at least 6 photographed strips (8 or more makes a smoother gradient).

Building the gradient

The first screen, Build the gradient, is where you order your strips light to dark and back, top band first. Drag to reorder the strips, or tap Light → Dark to let the app sort them by brightness for you and tweak from there. A footer tells you how the count looks (under 6 blocks the way forward; 6–7 works but 8+ is smoother; 8+ joins every strip as its own band). When it's right, tap Shape the Wave.

Shaping the wave

Now you shape the actual wave. Start from one of three presets across the top:

• Single Diagonal (the default): the gradient marches straight across on a diagonal.
• Classic Wave: one full sinusoidal sweep with eased shoulders.
• Mirrored Wave: a symmetric peak up the center column.

Then fine-tune. A live preview of the quilt sits above the controls, and a columns stepper sets how many columns the wave has. Tap a column in the preview to select it, and you get:

• A width stepper ("N wide"), to widen or narrow that column in ¼″ steps (that's the wave's speed, wider columns make a lazier wave).
• Up and Down buttons, to roll that column's colors up or down one band (that's where the color sits, which is where you'll unpick the tube).

A readout under the preview does the tube math: the finished size, and either "uses N strips" for a single tube, or "cuts N tubes: M strips of each print, T in all" when the wave needs more than one tube. That count is colored to warn you if a roll of all-different prints can't supply that many strips of each. Tap Generate to build the design and drop into the editor.

Editing a wave later

A bargello design has no per-patch palette (its fills follow the gradient, not your brush). Instead, the strip below the canvas reads "Fills follow the gradient sequence" with an Edit Wave button. Tap it to reopen the wave editor on your existing recipe, adjust the presets, columns, widths, and color rolls, then Save to rebuild. A bargello still makes a full pattern: its cut and sew instructions come through the Sew steps (sew the gradient strip-set, close it into a tube, slice the columns, open each at its own seam, join them), rather than a separate cut list, because that's how a bargello is actually built.

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Making a pattern

When a design is ready to sew, TideStitch turns it into a full pattern: what to cut, how much fabric to buy, and how to put it together.

The Patterns tab

Every design you've painted also appears in the Patterns tab, the one you carry to the cutting table. Open a pattern there, or jump straight to it from the editor with the one-tap Pattern button (in the top toolbar, or the ••• More menu on a narrow phone). Like Designs, the Patterns tab shows as a Gallery of pictures by default, with a List view in the top-right menu, and it remembers your choice separately from the Designs tab.

Reading a pattern

A pattern is split into sections you switch between with a segmented control at the top, so you move between the jobs you actually do instead of scrolling one long report. Each section ends by telling you what you should be holding:

• Overview: the finished size, the unfinished (pre-binding) size, and the seam allowance the cut sizes are figured with. A note reminds you that yardage doesn't account for fussy-cutting. A Block difficulty badge (Beginner, Confident, Advanced, or Expert) tells you at a glance how involved the block is to piece.
• Fabrics: a yardage estimate per fabric, plus a Not Yet Chosen line for any patches you haven't given a fabric yet.
• Cut: per-fabric rotary-cutting instructions, e.g. "cut 4″ squares × 3." (This section appears when the design breaks into cut units.)
• Sew: numbered, plain-language steps to piece the top, from cutting through squaring-up and binding, including a block-level sew order that builds one block in phases (make the units, sew the rows or sections, join the block) with press/nest/set-in notes where they matter.
• Finish: binding strips, backing, and batting for the finished top.

Batched half-square triangles. When a design needs a stack of matching HSTs (same two fabrics, same size), TideStitch batches them for you instead of making them one pair at a time. It groups the HSTs and picks the most efficient mix of 2-, 4-, and 8-at-a-time construction, then tells you exactly how many squares to cut, at what size, and how many finished HSTs each batch yields. If a batch makes a few more than you need, it says so as spares. You control the method and how much to oversize in Settings (see Half-square triangles).

Block difficulty and sew order. TideStitch reads the block's geometry and works out how it goes together. The Block difficulty badge rates the block from Beginner to Expert: plain grids of squares and triangles are Beginner, blocks with a busy spinning center or a partial seam are Confident, set-in (Y-seam) blocks like a LeMoyne star are Advanced, and anything with curves or an impossibly crowded center is Expert. The sew order then spells out the construction in phases, and blocks that need Y-seams or partial seams get a clearly-marked advanced-construction order (stop short of the corner and pivot, or sew a partial seam and come back to finish it) rather than a fake "just sew the rows."

Merge-aware patterns. If you've merged an area (see Merging patches), the pattern respects it: the merged region is cut as one big piece, drawn and billed as the single piece of fabric it is, and the assembly walks you through piecing the rest, then joining the big piece on as a late seam. For a block split on the diagonal (a background triangle behind a pieced design), the steps come out as a proper staircase: rows of decreasing length, each capped with an edge triangle, with press directions that alternate row to row so the seams nest, then one clean diagonal seam to join the background.

Pieced borders in the pattern. A Flying geese or Sawtooth border isn't just drawn, it's cut too. Once you've painted the geese or teeth, Cut gives the exact squares to rotary-cut and Sew adds a step to piece each side's row and set it between the corner pieces. Flying geese use the efficient no-waste method (one large point square plus four small background squares makes four geese), and the counts always match the live readout in the border's settings. Corner squares and corner blocks are cut too. A plain solid border isn't pieced, so it stays a simple yardage estimate.

Exporting a PDF

Tap Export PDF (the share button on the pattern) to generate a printable, multi-page document you can save, print, or send. It leads with a small picture of your finished design, then lays out the same sections (with the difficulty rating) as crisp text, with a page number in the bottom-right of every page. It's plain US-Letter paper, ready for the cutting table or the fabric store.

Once in a while, after you've finished exporting a pattern, TideStitch may quietly ask "Enjoying TideStitch?" Tap Yes, I love it to leave a quick App Store rating (it helps other quilters find the app), or It could be better to send a note straight to us instead. It only ever asks at a natural stopping point, never mid-task, and won't pester you if you'd rather not answer.

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Settings

The Settings tab holds app-wide preferences.

Seam allowance

TideStitch works in finished sizes, the space a piece takes up in the finished quilt, with seam allowances tucked into the seams. Your seam allowance is what the app adds back when it tells you a piece's squared-up (cut) size: finished + 2 × seam allowance per edge. (So a 3″ finished HST with a ¼″ seam cuts to about 3.5″.)

Pick from the presets Scant ¼″, ¼″ (the quilting standard), 1 cm, or 1.5 cm, or choose Custom and dial in your own with the stepper. The "How sizes work" section on the same screen spells out the finished-vs-cut math with your current setting plugged in. Seam-allowance changes can be undone with ⌘Z or a shake.

Cutting mode

A segmented picker with two options that controls how bias pieces (half-square and quarter-square triangles) are cut:

• Square-up (the default, recommended): bias units are cut a little oversized so you can trim them true after sewing. The amount of extra is set by Oversize under Half-square triangles.
• Precise: bias units are cut to their exact finished-plus-seam size, with no margin to trim. Choosing Precise hides the Oversize control, since there's nothing to add.

Your choice flows straight into every pattern's cut sizes.

Half-square triangles

Controls for how patterns build stacks of matching HSTs:

• Method: Auto (the default) lets TideStitch pick the fewest batches of 2-, 4-, or 8-at-a-time for each group of matching HSTs. Or force 2, 4, or 8 to use that method everywhere; a forced size is always used even when it makes a few spares.
• Largest batch (Auto only), cap Auto at 2, 4, or 8. Handy if you'd rather not wrangle the big 8-at-a-time squares.
• Oversize (Square-up cutting mode only, see Cutting mode above), how much extra to add per finished HST so there's room to trim each unit true after sewing. The default ⅛″ matches the familiar "cut 1″ bigger" rule for 2-at-a-time; the amount is scaled correctly onto the larger 4- and 8-at-a-time starting squares so those get their full trim room too.
• Scant-¼″ seam reminder: adds a note to the assembly steps to sew a hair under your seam allowance, so batched HSTs don't come up small.

Cut sizes always use your current seam allowance and cutting mode, and round up to the nearest ⅛″ so they land on a real ruler mark.

Fabric preview (vary placement)

Under Fabric preview, the Vary fabric placement toggle (on by default) controls how a fabric reads across many patches:

• On: each piece shows its own part of the fabric, the way pieces cut from different spots in the yardage really do, so fifty patches of one print don't look like fifty stamps of the same square inch. The print stays at true size and is never turned or rescaled, only slid.
• Off: every piece shows the dead center of its swatch. Turn it off when you're lining up a fussy cut and want the exact same framing on every piece.

Unpainted pieces (structure shading)

Under Unpainted pieces, the Shade unpainted pieces toggle (on by default) controls how a quilt you haven't colored yet is drawn:

• On: pieces you haven't picked a fabric for are shaded in gray by the block's own light and dark parts, so a Nine-Patch reads as a Nine-Patch instead of white on white before you've touched it. It's gray, not the block's real colors, because the fabric choice is still yours to make.
• Off: unpainted pieces are all one flat gray, which can be hard to read on a big quilt.

Either way, unpainted pieces stay out of the pattern and the shopping list, and this is a preview only, it never touches the cut list or the PDF. (Block designs only; a jelly roll, bargello, or freeform top has no light-and-dark structure to reveal.)

Fabric width

A read-only reference showing the usable width of fabric the app assumes when it estimates yardage, about 42″. Yardage figures assume roughly 42–44″ of usable width after you trim the selvages, a standard bolt. If your fabric runs narrower, buy a little extra.

Backing up your library

The Backup & Restore section lets you save your whole library to a file and bring it back later, useful for keeping a safety copy, moving to a new device, or sharing your designs with another quilter.

• Export Library gathers everything you've made: every design (with its borders, fabrics, colours, colorways, and layout), your entire stash of swatches (photos included), and all your jelly rolls, and packages it into a single .tidestitch file. Tap it, then choose where to save or how to send the file (Files, AirDrop, email, and so on). Keep that file somewhere safe; it's a complete snapshot of your library at that moment.
• Import Library reads a .tidestitch file back in. It merges: anything new is added to your library, and anything already there is left exactly as it is. Nothing gets overwritten or deleted, so importing is always safe, and importing the same file twice won't create duplicates. To move everything to a new iPad, install TideStitch there, then Export from the old device and Import the file on the new one.

Because the file format is shared across TideStitch, a backup exported on one device opens on any other.

Help, rating, and feedback

Under Help & support you'll find:

• User Guide: opens this manual on the web (slack-tide.dev/tidestitch/manual).
• Rate TideStitch: opens the App Store straight to the review screen if you'd like to leave a rating (thank you!).
• Contact Support and Send Feedback: both open a pre-filled email so you can tell us what's working and what isn't.
• Privacy Policy: opens TideStitch's privacy policy on the web.

Ratings and feedback genuinely shape what gets built next.

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Saving and syncing

TideStitch autosaves every change: adding fabric, painting a patch, renaming, resizing the grid. You can close the app or switch screens anytime without losing work.

If iCloud is set up, your stash and designs sync across your devices automatically. If it isn't, the app still works fully on that device using local storage, and will pick up sync once iCloud is configured.

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Quick reference

I want to…	Where to go
Add a fabric	Stash → Fabrics → ＋ New
Add many fabrics fast	Stash → Fabrics → ＋ New → Add Several from Library
Adjust a photo's color	Swatch editor → Exposure / Contrast / Saturation
Replace a swatch's photo	Open the swatch → Replace photo
Make a jelly roll	Stash → Jelly Rolls → ＋ New
Photograph strips	Jelly roll → Strips → Add
Start a block quilt	Designs → ＋ New design
Start from a jelly roll	Jelly roll → New design from this jelly roll
Design a bargello	Jelly roll → pattern picker → Bargello
Start a freehand board	Designs → ＋ → Design Your Own
View designs as pictures or a list	Top-right view menu → Gallery / List
Split a cell into triangles	Line tool → Diagonal → tap near the corner you want
Cut a cell straight across / down	Line tool → Across or Up-and-down → tap (snaps to centre)
Make a radial compass	Switch to Radial → Anchor to place the point → Ray to fan out rays
Remove a ray	Ray tool → tap the ray
Fill a patch	Tap a swatch/colour, then tap the patch
Erase a patch	Tap Clear, then tap the patch
Browse for an exact color	Colors row → tap a color-family dot → tints/shades + Hue + Vivid–Dusty
Zoom in on the canvas	Pinch to zoom, one-finger drag to pan, fit to snap back
Fill a wide screen with a long quilt	Zoom cluster → fit width or quarter turn (⌘8 / ⌘R)
See a design at true size	Zoom cluster → ruler (⌘9)
Undo / redo a change	Undo / Redo in the toolbar, or ⌘Z / ⌘⇧Z
Give the quilt the whole screen	Drag the Palette handle down (phone / portrait iPad)
Spin a whole block	Rotate tool, then tap the block
Spin a triangle	Rotate tool, then tap the HST unit
Set the background	Tool rail → Background
Size an HST grid	New design → HST Grid → across/down + Size by
Tile one block into a quilt	Layout → keep Fill new blocks from top-left on, then bump Rows/Columns
Set the quilt on point	Layout → Setting → On point
Stagger blocks like brickwork	Layout → Setting → Brick → Stagger + Drop
Add sashing between blocks	Layout → Sashing stepper (straight, multi-block grids)
Mix block types	Blocks palette → tap chip → tap cell
Size a jelly-roll grid	Layout → Quilt size → blocks across / down
Try a design in other fabrics	Colorways strip → New colorway → Swap
Compare two colorways	Colorways strip → Compare
Promote a colorway to its own quilt	Colorway chip ••• → Make Its Own Design
Frame a design with a border	Borders → ＋ Add border
Add a flying-geese or sawtooth border	Borders → border → Side style
Merge patches into one piece	Merge tool → tap same-fabric touching patches → Merge
Split a merged area	Merge tool → tap the shape → Unmerge
Make a cut list and pattern	Pattern button, or the Patterns tab
Export a pattern PDF	Open the pattern → Export PDF
Auto-fill a jelly-roll design	Randomize
Rename a design	••• More menu → Rename
Clear every fill	••• More menu → Clear All Fills
Line up a fussy cut	Settings → Fabric preview → turn Vary fabric placement off
Read an uncolored block's structure	Settings → Unpainted pieces → Shade unpainted pieces
Set your seam allowance	Settings → Seam allowance
Cut pieces exactly (no trim margin)	Settings → Cutting mode → Precise
Back up your whole library	Settings → Backup & Restore → Export Library
Restore or move to a new device	Settings → Backup & Restore → Import Library
Edit a starter design	Open it → Duplicate to Edit
Add fabric on Mac	Stash → Fabrics → ＋ New → Choose One (crop it) (no camera on Mac)
Delete on Mac	Control-click (or right-click) the card → Delete
Zoom on Mac	Zoom buttons above the quilt, or ⌘− / ⌘0 / ⌘=
Undo / redo on Mac	⌘Z / ⌘⇧Z

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Current as of version 1.5. Covers the Stash and swatch editor (with color adjustments and replace-photo), block, HST-grid, Squares, and Design Your Own designs, straight / on-point / brick settings, colorways, bargello, nested borders, whole-block and HST rotation, cut-as-one-piece merging, true-physical-scale fabric rendering with per-piece placement and structure shading, browsable colors, the rebuilt design editor (labeled tool rail, side-by-side palette, fit-width and quarter-turn view), full pattern generation across a dedicated Patterns tab (Overview, Fabrics, Cut, Sew, Finish) with a printable PDF, gallery and list views, full-library backup to a shareable .tidestitch file, and the Mac release.