About

Hi, I'm Trent

I'm a developer in Missouri who got into cross-stitch about a year ago, and Needlework Studio is the app I've been building ever since. Right now I'm running it as a one-person operation: I write the code, fix the bugs, answer the email, and the LLC on the paperwork is also me. It isn't a placeholder for a future team; it's how I run this thing as a real business while it's still just me doing the work.

How it started

The idea came from a small, repeated annoyance. Every time I started a new pattern I'd end up digging through my floss box for too long trying to figure out whether I already had a particular color, and more than once I bought a skein I already owned because I couldn't find the one sitting in there. I started building a thread inventory tool to solve that single problem.

What it became

Once it was working I realized I could keep going: pattern designer, pattern viewer, project tracker, and the same inventory, all talking to each other on the same patterns. As far as I can tell nobody else has actually combined the design side and the inventory side of cross-stitch into one app, so that's what I'm building.

Who it's for

The people I picture using it fall into three groups:

Across your devices

The part of the app I'm proudest of is the way it travels with you. I can sit at my laptop charting a pattern, leave it open, pick up the iPad on the couch and stitch from the same chart, then glance at my phone on the way out the door, and the same pattern with the same notes and the same per-color progress is right there waiting. The viewer has a Zen mode that hides the entire UI when you just want to stitch, the notes I take stay with the pattern instead of buried in some other app, and the whole thing runs locally first, with cloud sync as something you opt into rather than something you can't turn off.

Where it is now

Needlework Studio has been shipping at a steady cadence for months, with more than twenty releases behind it and beta testers across macOS, Windows, and Linux, plus an iPad viewer in development. The licensing system is built, the legal docs are in place, and the release pipeline is real. My goal is to make this my full-time work, and today that means writing code most days, talking to stitchers, fixing what they hit, and trying to earn the trust of the people who'll eventually pay for software with their own money.