I Hated All The Cross-Stitch Software So I Made My Own: My Deranged Outsider Software Suite For Making Deranged Outsider Art

yomimono

• 36 min
• 2025-12-30
• 160
• Fahrplan

I wanted to design beautiful header diagrams and ASCII tables suitable for stitching on throw pillows, but found existing tools for cross-stitch design to be all wrong. I made my own set of command-line tools for building this chunky, pixelated visual art. If you've never seen a cross-stitch sampler that had bitrot, this talk will fix it.

Designing cross-stitch patterns, I got frustrated with all the programs which expected me to click around a canvas setting individual pixels. I wanted a cross-stitch design software suite that I could drive with a Makefile, which could give me an interactive interface for stitching or compile them to PDF. In short, I wanted to say `echo "shutdown -h now" | embellish --border | export pattern --pdf` and get a design worthy of stitching on a pillow.

So, I made the thing I wanted. I'll discuss the many yak shaves along the way (proprietary file format reverse-engineering, OAuth2, what 'color' even means, unikernel hosting, and more). I'll talk a bit about the joy of making something so you can make something, and how it feels to craft software that is unapologetically personal.

Licensed to the public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

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