A cross-stitch (and fusible-beads) pattern generator for Windows that is specialized for pixel art and ease of use via drag-and-dropping of images.
The easiest way to use Pixie Stitch is to download the latest release from the release page and extract it to a directory of our choice.
We then can start drag-and-dropping our pixel-art images onto the pixie_stitch.exe.
Doing that will create a new folder which contains our cross-stitch-patterns and is named like
our image.
Additional example output including centered and "realistic" preview can be found in the examples directory.
As of now Pixie Stitch supports .png and .gif images with up to 20 colors. The number of colors
can be increased by adding additional black-and-white 16x16-pixels-sized symbol images in the
resources folder where our executable is located.
Pixie stitch has a very narrow use-case and is specialized for small pixel art with few colors and optional transparency.
For a more general use-case there are lots of other software for cross-stitch pattern generation like:
- https://www.pixel-stitch.net/
- https://www.stitchfiddle.com/en
- http://www.myphotostitch.com/Make_Pattern/Make_Pattern.html
- https://www.pic2pat.com/index.en.php
These have lot of extra feature like size- / color palette interpolation and yarn length
calculations. They also support way more image formats, output .pdf files and can run directly
in the browser.
Assuming we have Git installed first we need to clone and initialize this repository via:
git clone https://github.com/kerskuchen/pixie_stitch.git --recursive
Assuming we have Rust installed and can run cargo commands we can
build a release version by just running
cargo run --package ct_executable_packager
This creates a new folder named windows_shipping which contains the final executable ready to run
with all needed resources.
If we have the Resource Hacker tool in our %PATH the
above command script will also set a launcher icon and version information for our
executable.
We can build a debug version by running the usual cargo build command. The
Rust website has good information about how to start development
with Rust.
For development it is a good idea to check out the cottontail submodule on the master branch via
cd cottontail
git checkout master
That will make sure that we don't accidentally commit something to cottontail in the
detached HEAD state.