About Stitchloom

In short: Stitchloom is an independent, browser-only pattern maker. It shrinks your photo to the grid you choose, picks the best real thread, bead or yarn colours with perceptual (CIELAB ΔE) matching, then cleans up stray stitches. Your photo never leaves your device. Only at stitchloom.app.

How a photo becomes a pattern

1. Resample: the photo is averaged down to the grid size you set (each cell is the average of the pixels it covers), corrected for knitting gauge where needed.
2. Pick colours: k-means clustering in CIELAB space finds the main colours, then each is snapped to the nearest real colour in the chosen brand chart. Similar colours are merged until the colour limit is met, always merging the pair that changes the picture least.
3. Map cells: every cell gets its nearest chosen colour, optionally with Floyd–Steinberg dithering for smoother shading.
4. Clean up: optional background removal (flood fill from the edges) and confetti cleanup (single isolated stitches take the colour of their neighbours).
5. Count: materials are estimated from real coverage — about 1.8 m of 2-strand floss per 100 stitches on 14-count fabric, 1 bead per cell, about 1.3 m of worsted yarn per C2C block — and rounded up.

Colour data

DMC, Anchor, Perler, Hama and Artkal colour lists come from public community-maintained datasets (MakeBead colour data, CC BY 4.0; beadcolors, MIT) and are checked against the makers’ own charts. Screen colours are approximations — always look at the real thread or bead before you buy.

Trademarks

DMC, Anchor, Perler, Hama, Artkal and Red Heart are trademarks of their owners. Stitchloom is independent and not affiliated with them. “Brick mosaic” means generic 1×1 building plates; we are not affiliated with any brick toy maker.

Contact

Found a wrong colour or a bug? Email hello@stitchloom.app.