Authoring decorative motifs

A decorative motif is the small stitch pattern that a decorative stitch tiles along a path. You author your own motifs and save them as reusable .octodeco files.

Building a motif

A motif starts from a manual stitch object — the individual points are the motif:

Digitise the motif as a manual stitch run — one tile’s worth of the pattern.
Choose Tools → Create decorative stitch…
Refine the motif in the editor (below), give it a name, and click Done.

Once saved, the motif appears as a pattern option on the decorative stitch type, ready to tile along any path.

The motif editor

The editor shows your motif on the left and a chained preview on the right, so you can see how the tile joins to copies of itself as you work — which is the thing that’s hard to judge from a single tile.

Navigating: middle-drag to pan, scroll to zoom. The view stays put while you drag a node, so nothing rescales under the cursor.

Editing nodes:

Drag a node to move it. Double-click the path to add one, and Delete removes the selected node (a motif needs at least two).
The first node is green and the last is red. These are the two that join neighbouring tiles.
Corners are drawn as diamonds, curves as circles. Select a node and use the Curve and Corner buttons to convert between them.
On a curved node, drag a handle to bend the curve. The two handles mirror each other by default; hold Alt to break the mirror and shape each side independently.
Jump to node trims the thread and moves to that node without stitching. Use it for motifs made of separate marks — a dotted line, or a pattern with detached elements — rather than one continuous run.

Curved motifs

Adding a curve to any node makes the motif a Bézier motif, and Octostitch treats it differently when tiling: instead of stitching fixed points, it re-samples the curves at placement time using the Curve step setting on the stitch. The practical effect is that a curved motif stays smooth at any size — tile it at 4 mm or 40 mm and it won’t go visibly faceted.

Keep a motif all-corners if you want its points sewn exactly as authored (angular patterns, hand-look stitching, anything where a specific needle position matters).

The Create decorative stitch editor — the motif’s nodes on the left (green first, red last), with the chained preview on the right showing how the tile repeats.

Designing a tile that repeats cleanly

The one rule the editor enforces is that the first and last nodes must line up horizontally — Done stays disabled until they do. That’s what lets one tile hand over to the next without a kink at every join. The Align first → last and Align last → first buttons snap them for you, so you can draw freely and square it up at the end.

Beyond that, watch the chained preview rather than the tile:

Aim for the thread to leave the last node heading roughly the way it enters the first, or every join gets a visible corner.
Keep the motif’s height balanced around the path line if you want it centred; offset it deliberately if you want the motif to sit to one side.
Trailing detail near the end node ends up right next to the leading detail of the next tile — if two features are going to collide, that’s where.

A saved motif is a single self-contained .octodeco file, so you can share one by copying the file — or bring one in with Tools → Import decorative stitch…

For now, your motifs are stored in the user decoratives folder:

Windows — %APPDATA%\octostitch\decoratives
macOS / Linux — octostitch/decoratives under your config directory (e.g. ~/.config/octostitch/decoratives)

Octostitch reads its bundled motifs and this folder, with your motifs taking priority if a name clashes.