Why I built Heddle around composition instead of pixels

Open most cross-stitch design tools and you land on an empty grid. You draw, or you convert a photo, one stitch at a time. That is a good model for a custom portrait or a pixel-art logo. It is a poor model for a sampler.

How samplers are actually designed

A sampler is an arrangement. A border, an alphabet, a verse, a few motifs, laid out with care. There is a whole shelf of print books built on exactly this idea: pick motifs, borders, and letters from a collection and combine them.

The parts already exist. The work is choosing them and arranging them well.

Doing that on a screen

In Heddle a motif is an object. You drag it into place, resize it by whole stitches, flip it, recolor it, and move it forward or back. You never have to touch an individual stitch unless you want to, and you never lose your place in the grid.

The floss list is visible the whole time and updates with every change, so the color count is never a surprise at the end.

What this is not

It is not a replacement for a full pixel editor, and it does not try to be. If you want to draw freehand on a very large grid, other tools do that well. I'm focused on the arranging part, and on making the licensing of the parts clear.