Full disclosure before I say anything else, I’m asking this out of personal curiosity and a desire to help friends out but also because I plan on making a video about it so yes it’s kind of a research question too.
Ok. So personally I use Pattern Keeper, and it’s been great. But I find myself wondering what other apps have popped up in the couple of years since I first discovered PK. The other day someone tagged me in a Mastodon question about alternatives, and then a similar convo coincidentally broke out on Discord too, so clearly other people are asking the same question.
Now, I know about a few apps already. Markup R-XP has a devoted following. CrossStitchSaga I apparently need to try because I hear it supports backstitch. And resident app developer @ClickStitch@sh.itjust.works posts here regularly with updates on their new contender.
But I thought I’d cast a wider net and see what everyone else is using.
Do you use one of the ones I listed? Do you use another specialised cross stitch app? Do you use something that was originally designed for a totally different purpose but turns out to work great for stitching? Or do you prefer to keep things analog and mark off printed patterns with a pen?
Would love to hear what you like and dislike about your current solution, and I’m hoping to get to test a load of them out and do a proper comparison of them all.
I promise to do a writeup of the conclusions here too so it’s not just stuck in video form!
I’m the analog weirdo who’s currently about halfway through this kit using a printed paper pattern that I don’t even bother to mark off (and yes, I do occasionally miss a few stitches in a given colour and have to load up a spare needle to fix it). Since I don’t carry a phone or tablet, and I do most of my stitching on a different floor of the house from my computer, my setup just isn’t app-friendly.
(I’m also a Linux user, which restricts the set of commodity software available to me.)
Respect! I can do it your way for relatively small patterns but it would drive me mad with full coverage. I remember working on Alpine by Satsuma Street like that, and ending up with one missed stitch in the middle of a mountain, and omg I could not convince myself to go in and fix it for the sake of one stitch! Took forever to get my brain to agree to do it 😅
I admit, I cheat a bit—if I can fill in a stitch I missed with one of the colours I’m working now rather than the intended one, and still have the result make visual sense, I go right ahead and do that. Just not enough of a perfectionist, I guess. 😅
Absolutely with you on that one! Sadly Alpine was very block colours, clean lines so it would’ve been obvious. But nothing wrong with a bit of bodging where appropriate 😀
Using a tablet helps a lot even if you don’t use one of these apps. I just pull up patterns in Acrobat and I can zoom in on whichever part I’m working on. It’s also good for paper patterns since I can take a picture of the pattern and zoom in on that if need be, and I don’t have papers flapping around everywhere lol
I keep it super simple. No fancy apps, no subscription fees, just working directly from the pattern
That’s just my opinion of course, if you’re happy sticking to the paper pattern then that’s probably the best way to do it!
It’s more a matter of being used to the paper pattern. That, and the fact that if I drop it while wrestling my thread-eating cat out of the way, it’s unlikely to break, eheheh.
(I could also ramble on for a while about Why I Would Feel It Necessary to Build My Own Tablet, but it isn’t germane here. Suffice to say that I’m unlikely to find a consumer-level device that operates in a way that I’m willing to put up with.)
That’s a fair point! To be honest I really only use my tablet for cross stitch, watching tv, and looking up guitar tabs so I don’t really need it to do anything too complicated lol
I’m a computer programmer by profession. I spend 12+ hours a day, every day, staring at screens. The second-last thing I want to do in my off hours is arm wrestle bad user interfaces (especially if I have to do it while also wrangling cats). If I’m not being paid to deal with a device, it can do things my way or get sent back to the manufacturer. So there. 😜
That would definitely make me sick of looking at screens too lol!
My own contribution:
I love Pattern Keeper mostly because it’s very intuitive, I didn’t need to look at any instructions and was able to just install it and use it whereas some others I’ve bounced off because they were a bit more opaque. The symbol search feature is my favourite and being able to customise colours and transparency is a great accessibility feature.
While there’s no way for it to fully read some pattern PDFs depending how they were created, I like how it has a sort of sliding scale of features all the way from fully interactive and searchable, down to “take a photo of your paper pattern and mark stitches off manually” so you can at least always use it even if you don’t have a fully compatible pattern.
Minor dislikes are that it doesn’t do backstitch, and I wish it kept historical stats. But from the designer side my main gripe is that it’s impossible to find any technical info on how to make your patterns compatible other than “use certain approved design software”. But I guess that’s probably just me being extra curious about how things work.
I’ve tried Pattern Keeper and Mark-up and on both of them I feel like I end up spending more time trying to set up the file and mark my progress than I do actually stitching… I don’t think there’s anything wrong with these apps, I think my brain just isn’t set up to work that way lol I’m still just working straight from PDFs on my tablet right now
It definitely depends on the pattern and whether it’s a proper readable one or not. Having PK for my full coverage project with 100k stitches is invaluable! Having it for a random pattern off Etsy that doesn’t have full compatibility…not quite such a gamechanger 😀
Yeah, I can definitely see it being useful for that full coverage tapestry you’ve been working on lol! That’s so many little individual colors to keep up with!
@thegiddystitcher Thanks for your video on YouTube about Mastadon. My sis sent it to me and now here I am. Looking forward to the new experience.
Thank you for mentioning ClickStitch 🙏 I’ve been using it more often recently for actual stitching (and not developing the app!) and it’s really handy to keep track of the stats!
I’m not a regular user of the other apps since I used to just use Excel to mark stitches as complete so these comments are interesting to see how everyone stitches haha
I’d be so intrigued to know more about the Excel method. Marking off stitches I get, but how did you get the pattern into Excel in the first place?!
Haha, when I started making my own patterns from images, I use FlossCross.com which has the option to export as an fcjson, then I wrote a script to convert it into an Excel doc.
Excel is able to lookup cells by background colour, so I’d find cells with the thread index with the original colour (as in, not ones I’ve marked as green) in order to find remaining stitches per colour.
Obviously it’s a bit clunky so I made ClickStitch!
Omg the dedication! 😂
Currently just a paper pattern guy. The last one I did was small enough I didn’t bother crossing stuff off. I am marking up the Totoro pattern though.
@thegiddystitcher My sister cross stitches and I knit/crochet, we both use knitCompanion. It’s pretty great.
