You've probably noticed by now, but the site just got a major facelift. Over the winter holiday we spent some time redesigning the site, and it is finally ready to launch. The pattern making forms should be a lot clearer now, and the advertisements should be clearly labeled. Unfortunately, the iPad does not allow picture uploading to web pages, so you can not make patterns from it (it is an Apple problem, unfortunately). If you find any other problems, please Let us know

Additionally, we are considering adding user accounts that would let people store their patterns online, show them off, and track their progress as they're stitching. If you are interested, sign up here to get early access to the program when it launches.

If you have any questions, concerns, or find any problems with the site redesign, then let us know. Otherwise, happy stitching.

I apologize to everyone who has had trouble with the website in the past few weeks.

My web host recently changed their quota system, and as a result the site now goes over quota towards the end of the day. This causes error messages like:

"OverQuotaError: The API call datastore_v3.Put() required more quota than is available."

If you see that error, please try again in 8-12 hours. My web host resets my quota at approximately midnight, pacific standard time. If you wait until after then, it should work as normal. Again, I apologize for inconvenience, and I'll fix it when I get back home in the middle of December.

Last weekend my sister gave me the nicest present ever. As a thank you gift for making her the site, she made me a cross stitch from a photo of my brother, sister, and I, based on the photo on the about page.

She's been working on it in secret for a very long time, and when she gave it to me it just blew me away. I love you cutie 3.14...!

In other news, I just checked and the site has generated over 100,000 patterns. Even if most of them will never be stitched, it's still amazing to me. Thanks to everyone who has written with comments and helpful suggestions, and thanks to everyone who has shared patterns with the blog. I'm swamped with work for the next few weeks, so I won't be posting many updates, but keep sharing your patterns and I'll try post them as soon as I can.

I finally found some time to make some improvements on the site. It started off with one, but then I got on a roll and was able to make a bunch of improvements that I've been wanting to make.

Here is a list of the improvements:

• I added a cover page in the pdf, which lists all of the threads in the pattern and gives a preview of the result. It also shows what my program thinks each of the thread colors is, so you can verify that the color matches the actual thread (since the colors vary, depending on lighting and dmc dye lot, so I always recommend that you double check the thread colors before you get started.)
  
• I changed how I select the thread colors to use. Now it does a much better job of choosing good colors, especially when you only want to use a few threads. It also does much better at choosing enough thread colors (e.g. before if you wanted 40 thread colors, oftentimes it would give you a pattern with only 20. Now it's much more likely to give you a pattern with 39 or 40 colors.)
  
• I added an option to use only grayscale threads, or to use a simple, reduced set of thread colors (as opposed to the 400+ threads)
  
• I also created a blog archive page and a page to browse all tags. In addition to this, I made the archive browsing pages a bit friendlier.
  

Please let me know what you think of the improvements, if anything breaks or stops working, or if you have any other feedback about the site. Thanks for using it, and happy stitching.

My webhost will be doing maintenance from 5pm-6pm Pacific Time on Feb. 17. During this time the site won't be able to make any patterns, so please check back later if you run into any issues.

In other news, I'm about to pass a major deadline in my day job, so I'll be back to posting the patterns that you share. I have a bunch waiting from the past few weeks, but keep sending in your favorite results

After a long hiatus of being too busy with other work and not doing much with the site, I just checked my logs and discovered that, as of yesterday, this site has generated its 30,000th cross stitch pattern!

Thanks to those who have shared their patterns with the blog. I have a large backlog right now, and I'll do my best to start actually posting them. :)

And thanks to everyone using the site. I hope you have found it useful, and I hope that you're enjoying cross stitching the patterns you make on the site. As always, if you have any feature requests or improvements to suggest, please let me know!