Threads and palettes
Every object has a color, chosen from the design's palette. The palette lives on the bottom bar, at the bottom left of the editor.
The palette
The colors strip on the bottom bar is the everyday quick-pick: a row of the design's swatches. Click one to make it the active color, which also recolors anything you have selected.
Edit colors opens the full palette editor in a popover, which is a grid of swatches with a one-row detail bar underneath for whichever color is active:
- Drag swatches to reorder them.
- The + tile at the end of the grid adds a color.
- In the detail bar: double-click the name to rename it, or use Edit (pencil) and Remove (trash). Remove is hidden when only one color is left.
- Manage opens the Design palettes dialog.
- Reduce merges close colors across the whole design: see below.
The Colors panel was retired in v1.2.2: it took a whole dock for a row of swatches. Everything it did is in the Edit colors popover.
Deleting a color, and applying a palette
Deleting a color that objects are using recolors them to a surviving swatch, rather than leaving them painted in a thread that has been removed from the palette. One Ctrl/Cmd+Z reverses the whole thing, and if you delete the active color the drawing color moves too.
Applying a saved palette keeps the colors your design is actually using, rather than clearing everything and orphaning the objects that referenced them.
Picking a color off the screen
The color picker (from + or Edit) has an eyedropper button beside the hex field: "Pick a color from the screen." What it can reach depends on your browser and platform:
- In Chrome or Edge, and in the Windows desktop app, it samples any pixel anywhere on your screen, including outside Boldbobbin.
- On the macOS desktop app, and in Firefox and Safari, it samples inside the Boldbobbin window instead, with a magnified loupe following your cursor. That still covers your design and any reference image you've placed.
Press Esc to cancel. The picked color lands in the hex field, so nothing changes until you confirm.
Color reduction
If a design ended up with more thread colors than you'd like (often from importing artwork), Reduce in the Edit colors popover merges perceptually-close colors design-wide to cut down on color changes. Set the merge distance, watch the preview update ("N colors → M"), and confirm. It has nothing to merge on a design with only one color, and says so if your distance is too small to merge anything.
This is a different tool from the SVG importer's own Match close colors option (which only affects that one import): see Import an SVG.
Design palettes dialog
The Design palettes dialog has three tabs:
- Current: add, rename, reorder, and match the colors in this design.
- Saved: save the current palette as a named preset and re-apply it to
other designs later. You can also Export a palette to a
.jsonfile and Import one back. - Threads: pick which thread brands ("charts") you own.
Thread charts
Boldbobbin bundles thread charts from many brands (for example Madeira, Isacord, Robison-Anton, Sulky, Brother, DMC, Aurifil, and more). You tell Boldbobbin which charts you own in the Threads tab (or during first-run setup); those become your owned threads.
Matching a palette color to a thread
Boldbobbin matches colors perceptually (in OKLab color space), so the nearest thread is the one that looks closest to the eye, not just numerically.
- Match… / Re-match on a palette color opens the Match thread dialog, which lists the nearest thread colors from your enabled charts, each with a ΔE (smaller = closer). See Match thread colors.
- Match automatically to my threads matches every palette color at once. Turn on Different colours to different threads to force a one-to-one assignment (needs at least as many owned threads as colors).
When you confirm a match, the design remembers the exact thread (brand, chart, code), so your run sheet PDF can name the real thread.