Everything the studio does, in the order you are likely to need it. If you are new, start with Surprise me and change one thing at a time.
FourPatch runs in the browser. There is nothing to install and you do not need an account to design — open the studio and it is ready. Your work saves automatically to the browser you are using; an account moves it to the cloud so you can pick it up on another device.
The fastest way in is the Surprise me button. It generates a complete quilt — palette, block, layout, borders — from a random seed. Press it until something catches your eye, then start changing things. Most people find it easier to edit a whole quilt than to build one from an empty grid.
The Quilt panel controls the top as a whole.
The Blocks panel holds every block in the current quilt. Add one from the library of 35, duplicate an existing block, or start from an empty grid.
Inside the editor, a block is a grid of cells and each cell holds one patch type:
Click a patch to recolour it. Select a cell and rotate or mirror it to change which way the diagonal leans — this is the difference between a Pinwheel and Broken Dishes, and between a Sawtooth Star and an Evening Star.
Blocks can also be placed individually. Any block in the quilt can be rotated, mirrored or swapped for a different block without touching its neighbours, which is how you build alternating and pinwheel settings. On the quilt itself the Stamp tool lays down whichever block is chosen beside the toolbar; Rotate and Flip act on the block you tap.
Cells do not have to be square. Set a block's cell aspect to 1:2 and a half-square triangle becomes a half-rectangle triangle — the shape behind chevrons, herringbone and lightning-streak quilts. FourPatch keeps the two mirrored versions separate in the cutting list, because they are different pieces rather than the same one turned over.
A setting decides how pieces cover the quilt top. FourPatch drafts nine, and switching between them keeps the finished size roughly the same by refitting the row and column count rather than stretching the quilt.
Block settings — straight, on point, and half-drop rows — carry a pieced block in every position. One-patch settings have no block: equilateral triangles, hexagons, tumbling blocks (60° diamonds), tumblers, clamshells and apple core repeat a single shape, and the design is entirely in where the fabrics go.
Every one-patch setting prints a full-size cutting template with the cutting line solid, the finished line dashed inside it, and a 2″ ruler check to catch a printer that has scaled the page. The templates are generated by offsetting the finished shape by a quarter inch, so they can never drift from what is drawn on screen. The settings guide covers all nine with diagrams.
The photo converter takes the same shapes: a photograph can become squares, 1:2 or 2:1 rectangles, triangles, hexagons, diamonds, tumblers, clamshells or apple cores.
The palette is a list of fabrics, each with a name and a colour. Change a fabric and every patch using it updates everywhere at once — this is the fastest way to audition a colourway.
There are 18 built-in palettes covering historical and modern ranges: Civil War repro, 1930s feedsack, Amish jewel tones, low-volume, Gee's Bend, and others. Each names its fabrics rather than numbering them, so the printed pattern reads like a fabric list instead of a colour key.
You can also load an image of a real fabric and use it as a fill, which shows how a print will actually read at the scale of your patches — something a flat colour swatch cannot tell you.
Value view converts the whole design to greyscale. This is the single most useful button in the app. Quilts work on value contrast far more than on colour, and a design that looks lively in colour but flat in greyscale will look flat on the bed.
Load a photograph and FourPatch converts it into a piecing chart: it clusters the image's colours in CIE Lab space into a fabric palette, divides the image into a grid, and assigns each cell a fabric. Where a cell straddles a strong diagonal edge it can split the cell into two triangles so the quilt follows the line instead of stepping around it.
Controls: tile shape, grid resolution, palette size, triangle threshold, and optional Floyd–Steinberg dithering for smooth gradients. The photo-to-quilt guide explains what each does to the finished quilt.
Tile shape is the one worth playing with. A square grid is the default; 1:2 and 2:1 cells follow shallow edges better than a 45° diagonal can; and the one-patch settings — triangles, hexagons, tumblers, clamshells — give the picture a texture that squares cannot. Shape buys fidelity at the edges, but what makes a photo quilt readable is still value contrast.
The conversion runs entirely on your device. The image is never uploaded unless you save the design to a cloud account.
The Pattern panel is the output of everything else. It lists:
Under Settings you can change the usable fabric width (40″ default), the seam allowance, and the waste percentage (10% default). All three flow through every number.
Print or save the pattern as a PDF. Pro adds your own name and logo to the printed pattern, which matters if you sell patterns.
Designs autosave to the browser you are working in, with no account. That storage is per-browser: it does not follow you to your phone.
A free account keeps up to three designs in the cloud, so you can open them anywhere. Sign-in is by emailed link — there is no password to choose or forget.
Pro removes the design limit, raises the photo-quilt resolution cap, and adds SVG export, fabric-image textures, share links, and your name on printed patterns.
Share links publish a read-only view of one design at its own URL. Anyone with the link can see the quilt and its cutting list without an account.
On desktop the canvas supports scroll to zoom and drag to pan. Undo and redo work throughout with the usual shortcuts.
On phones and tablets the panels become a bottom sheet you can drag up, and the canvas supports pinch to zoom and two-finger pan. The studio is designed to be usable standing in a fabric shop, not just at a desk — the layout, the palette and the yardage total are all reachable one-handed.
The FAQ covers the questions people ask most, including privacy, offline use, pattern licensing and refunds.