Density & resizing

What density means

Density is how closely packed the stitches are — the spacing between rows in a fill, or between zigzag “bites” in a satin column. It’s the single biggest factor in how a design sews:

• Too dense and the thread piles up, the fabric stiffens, and you risk thread breaks or needle damage.
• Too sparse and the fabric shows through with thin, gappy coverage.

Octostitch works in real millimetres, and stitch settings like spacing_mm are expressed in those real-world units, so the density you set is the density you get.

Density-aware resize

In many older tools, scaling a design just stretches the existing stitches — make a design bigger and the rows spread apart into gaps; make it smaller and they bunch up into a solid, unstitchable mass.

Octostitch avoids this. Because each object stores its path and stitch settings rather than a frozen set of stitch points, resizing scales the geometry and then regenerates the stitches from the new size at the original density.

The practical result:

• Scale a fill up and it gets more rows, not wider gaps.
• Scale a satin column down and it stays properly covered, not bunched.
• The spacing, underlay and stitch lengths you chose still apply at the new size.

Density-aware resizing (left) adds rows as the fill grows; a naive stretch (right) just opens up gaps.

Note

Resizing keeps a design stitchable, but it doesn’t remove the need to review it. Very large or very small sizes can still push a stitch type past what suits it — a satin column that becomes too wide, for example, is better re-thought as a fill. See Satin column for auto-split behaviour on wide columns.