I had been trying to use InkScape and Ink/Stitch to digitize images for embroidery patterns. While I am certain that not really knowing what I’m doing is a huge component … I never manage to get a good pattern. The digitization process also sucks up all the resources on my laptop before falling over and requiring a restart. I was going to borrow Scott’s gaming laptop (lots of memory, lots of CPU, and GPU). Then I came across Threads — a Python Uvicorn server that uses the Ink/Stitch API to digitize images into embroidery patterns.

There was a significant limitation that I assume comes from the documented usage: you cannot create a pattern with a large number of unique colors. You can select up to six thread colors. However, I wasn’t going to run the tool on a laptop. I’m going to run it on a VM on our big server. Plenty of memory and processor available. And it can chug along, doing its thing, without impacting other VMs. So I created a fork that allows up to 32 unique thread colors (more than you probably want).

I want to digitize this mushroom design I created for Scott: