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Hi all!

I have some questions about selling cross stitch patterns online. I recently moved overseas and quit my day job, so have an abundance of time on my hands, and I was thinking about starting up an Etsy shop. Unfortunately the postal service here is abysmal so I cannot sell actual items that require shipping, but I was thinking about designing and developing cross stitch patterns in PDF format, that I can sell electronically.

I'm an experienced cross stitcher, with less design experience but I'm a keen and willing student!

I've been looking at software to design patterns, but I'm unsure which programme will allow me to customise the pattern (with logo etc) allow me to add finished product photographs, instructions and then save in PDF format for sale. I've only been able to find reviews about these programmes for casual/hobby use.

Can someone here give me advice before I spend money on a programme that may not be what I want?

Thanks in advance. Lizzie

What you might be able to use is something that creates a front page (eg MS Word), and save it as a PDF file. Then have a standard instruction file in PDF format.

Most chart creation software allows you to print the chart. This can be done to a PDF printer, like PDFCreator, to create a chart file. PDFCreator is free. Chart creation software can be free too - see my signature for one possible bit of software, there are a number of others.

Then you can stitch the multiple files together using another free program such as PDFSAM (PDF Split and Merge).

It is then possible to watermark the PDF file, so both the official recipient is identified and so too is the original copyright holder. There may be software to do it, but this web page also does it:

http://www.watermark-images.com/pdf-watermark.aspx

Hope this may expand the possibilities.

Regards

Richard.

Hello & welcome Lizzie. I am not into that side of x stitching but several on here who are. Richard is great with that side of it & helping people & quite a few others are too. Good luck with your venture.

Thanks for your replies so far. Very helpful information Richard, this was what I was thinking but didn't want to get involved with a programme that prevented me from doing what I needed.

I've just found a helpful post on the Etsy forums about what programme the designers there use, and PC Stitch seems to be the most popular.

PC Stitch is popular.
For the quality of conversion from a separately created image, it is massively outclassed by some other programs (my one included). Quite frankly, PC Stitch's conversion is the same as the worst possible from my program.
For designing stuff from scratch, it isn't too bad. But you do not need to use just one program, you will probably get less frustrated if you use a number of programs and use each for the thing it's best at.
HaED use Pattern Maker (PM), but do not always work around PM's limitations with regard to dark colours.

For designing from scratch using my program, and I imagine most of the free programs, it is probably best to create the image in an image editor (eg Gimp, PaintShop Pro, MS Paint, PhotoShop) and then import the image into the chart creating program. One word of warning: MS Paint and Gimp both alter the colours slightly each time you save & open the file. My program has a small image editor built in, but I really view it as a method of fixing incorrect pixels rather than as a way of creating images from scratch - though I have added one or two features that would be very useful to designers. A block is one of the unique features, where you can make multiple copies of a shape, rotate/move/mirror the copies etc, then edit the master block, and all the copies automatically change to match it. This is good for borders to things like Chatelaines. Text, lines, circles, flood fills etc can all be edited after creation. And my program - unusually - has blends built in to the program so they are no harder than solid colours to use. If you ever define your own floss range, the program automatically creates a blend range based on that floss range, which is much easier than manually entering colour definitions for each of the 11000 blends you may want to use (as in PC Stitch & PM). If you find there are features you want, let me know and I'll see if I can program them in - done it several times for Allyn, to the great benefit of the program's capabilities.

Regards,

Richard.