A Right Stitch-up: Creating embroidery patterns with Pillow

Embroidery is a technology that dates back centuries and is still popular in the present day among craftspeople around the world. Cross-stitch refers to the creation of crosses in a grid that combines to build up an image, based on a ‘chart’ or pattern of the intended design.

Even though entire pieces could be created based on completely manual processes, much of the technology behind automating chart creation is locked behind paid software.

During this presentation, we will discuss how we can leverage the Python Imaging Library (PIL, now Pillow) in order to take source images and turn them into cross-stitch charts.