Cross Stitch Design Programmes

So you want to get into cross stitch design? First of all you'll need to choose a programme. 

I would recommend BlendThreads (free download) if you do not wish to sell/distribute your patterns or just do one off exclusive patterns. I think the official terms and conditions say the patterns made via this programme can be distributed to a maximum of ten people. 

If you do want to sell/distribute in mass I would recommend WinStitch but it costs around £40 not including updates. I believe Lord Libidan has a discount code. It takes a while to learn all the functions but it is definitely worth it. 

If you have no money to buy WinStitch I would say try CStitch which is free. You have to make pixel art before hand or decide on an image you want to convert as you can only convert images. You can edit the images but it is a steep learning curve. You also cannot do French knots or backstitch. I used this in my earlier blog posts if you want to see the difference between the output of this and WinStitch (although with both I made pdfs into jpegs).

 CStitch is open source meaning if you have coding knowledge you could make it work for you but you'd need rather extensive coding knowledge. 

Hopefully this helped in choosing a cross stitch design programme. Let me know if there are any other topics you want me to cover.