Fill Tool

Basics

Fill is your "paint bucket" for stitches. Click once and every connected stitch of the same color changes to your active color.

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Use it when you want:

• A clean background block.
• Fast recolors ("make all this blue area teal").
• Quick cleanup after photo conversion.

Fill is instant, and Undo brings it back in one step.

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Quick start

1. Pick a color (Primary).
2. Press G to switch to Fill.
3. Click the area you want to change.

That's it. The connected area of the same color becomes your active color.

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How fill works

Starting from the stitch you click:

1. Fill checks what color that stitch is.
2. It spreads to all touching stitches (up, down, left, right) that have the same color.
3. It keeps spreading until it hits a different color or the edge of the pattern.
4. All found stitches become your active color.

Fill is color-mix aware — it matches the exact combination of colors in each stitch, not just the primary color. This means dithered areas are treated correctly: a region of DMC 310 + DMC 3371 dithered together is treated as a separate "color" from pure DMC 310.

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The entire fill is one Undo step, no matter how many stitches are affected.

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Common uses

• Background block-in: Click empty background areas to fill them with your base color.
• Quick recolor: Click a block of one shade to swap it for another.
• Clean up after conversion: Fill small odd-colored patches to match surrounding areas.
• Controlled fill with selection: Draw a selection first, then Fill inside it — the color can't spill past the border.

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Filling within a selection

When you have an active selection, Fill respects the selection boundary:

• Stitches inside the selection are eligible for filling.
• Stitches outside are ignored, even if they're the same color and connected.

This lets you fill one section of a shape without affecting the rest of the pattern — even when colors are connected across the design.

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Pro tip: Draw a rectangle selection around the area you want to fill, then click with Fill. This prevents the fill from "leaking" into connected areas elsewhere in the pattern.

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Dithering & eraser

Like other drawing tools, Fill supports dithering and eraser modes:

• Single-color dithering — Filled stitches are scattered by the density setting, creating a textured fill.
• Two-color dithering — Filled stitches are split between primary and secondary colors based on the dither pattern.
• Eraser / Right-click — Clears all connected same-color stitches. Quick way to erase a whole area at once.

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Tips & gotchas

• One click, entire area. Fill is the fastest way to recolor a large block. No dragging needed.
• Color boundaries are strict. Even one stitch of a different color stops the fill. If a fill doesn't go where you expect, zoom in and check for stray stitches at the boundary.
• If it filled too much: You probably had a gap in the boundary. Undo, patch the gap, then fill again. Or use a selection to contain it.
• If it didn't fill enough: There's probably a subtle color difference at the boundary. Zoom in to check — dithered stitches and near-identical shades can create invisible boundaries.
• Right-click to erase. Quick way to clear a whole connected area.
• Selection keeps it contained. Use a selection for the cleanest boundaries, especially in patterns with large same-color areas where you only want to change part of it.
• Works from Brush too. Ctrl+Click with the Brush triggers a fill without switching tools.
• Dithering creates textures. Fill an area with two-color dithering for a cross-hatched or blended effect.
• Undo is one step. No matter how big the fill, Cmd/Ctrl+Z reverts it all at once.

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Under the hood (optional)

• Connectivity: Fill uses 4-way connectivity (up/down/left/right). Diagonal stitches don't count as connected.
• Color matching: Fill matches the exact stitch mix (all colors in a stitch), not just the dominant color. This is why dithered areas are treated as distinct from solid areas.
• Performance: Large fills use an optimized row-run encoding format — spans of consecutive stitches in each row are recorded together, making fills on large patterns fast and memory-efficient.