Cross stitch · phone and tablet · iOS and Android
TRAMA is far more than a pattern viewer: it's the whole ecosystem for people who stitch by hand. Build the pattern, edit it stitch by stitch, work it with live tracking and keep the story of how you made it. Always in DMC threads that actually exist.
Coming soon to the App Store and Google Play
New Temperature patterns: your year, in thread
500+
DMC colours from the official catalogue
8
stitch types on the same grid
17
languages, including yours
iOS · Android
phone and tablet, iOS and Android
From image to pattern
Turning an image into something you can actually stitch is the hard problem in this app, and it's where TRAMA has spent its years. The engine is ours: it decides where every stitch goes and which real thread it gets stitched in.
A photo, an illustration, an SVG, a pattern PDF you already bought, or an image generated with AI inside the app itself.
Every shade is resolved against the official DMC catalogue by true colour distance in CIELAB. If a code doesn't exist it gets remapped to the nearest one — never invented into a thread you can't buy.
Grid, symbols, backstitch and fractional layers. Ready to stitch on screen, edit cell by cell, or export as a professional PDF.
Pattern Studio
Pattern Studio lets you move the resolution and see the result instantly, pick the quality profile, and let TRAMA propose the advanced layers.
Raise or lower the stitch count and watch the pattern change as you drag — no waiting for a render.
Every image asks for a different engine to pull its palette. TRAMA reads yours and picks: there is no selector to guess at.
Oil for photos and painting, Flat ink for illustration and line art. TRAMA picks based on the image you give it, and you switch profile if you disagree.
TRAMA proposes the two-thread blends, backstitch and fractionals that improve the pattern, and previews them before applying.
Woodland fairy
270 × 312 stitches, every detail kept
Full screen, with rulers
The pattern as it is, before a single stitch
Move the resolution, everything follows
Stitches, total and real centimetres on Aida 14ct
Autumn in the country
A landscape at 225 × 169 stitches
Girl with a pomegranate
An illustration at 180 × 231 stitches
Bird among flowers
Flat colours at 180 × 215 stitches
Pop portrait
Poster colours at 93 × 93 stitches
Stained-glass fox
125 × 125 stitches, with its palette on top
Lady with an Ermine
Leonardo, at 250 × 341 stitches
Image generator
An assistant with prompts curated by theme — pets, botany, mandalas, landscapes, fantasy, vintage — generates images built so TRAMA's engine converts them well. You can also start from a photo of your own as reference.
The technical win
Creating, importing, editing and stitching all share the same high-resolution grid. That's why a three-quarter stitch you draw in the editor looks identical in Follow Along and prints identical in the PDF: nothing is converted along the way, nothing is lost. Building a fluid grid that accepts every one of these stitch types at once is the hardest part of all this, and the part we're proudest of.
The usual fill, with its symbol and colour.
Chained polyline, 1/2/3 strands, solid or dashed stroke.
Half, quarter, three-quarter and petit, oriented by quadrant.
On grid intersections, on its own layer.
Sewn bead, drawn as a ring.
Double cross filling the cell.
Long satin stitch.
Two threads in one needle; the shopping list splits it into both skeins.
A cell takes two parts: the classic three-quarter in one colour plus the complementary quarter in another. And it all travels through mirrors, rotations and region moves without losing its bearings.
At the frame
The mode for stitching with the pattern in front of you. You work by sections, mark stitches with a tap, and everything — counter, stats, journal, exports — updates itself. It's built so following the pattern is easy and marking feels good.
Progress is saved on the device and, when you're signed in, backed up to the cloud: marked cells, parking, bookmarks and notes. When you return, «Where I left off» takes you back to your last cell.
Every pattern on this page was made with TRAMA, start to finish, by someone who is not a designer.
Absolute column and row for the cell at the centre of the screen, always visible as you move the map.
Brush mode locks the canvas so you mark in one continuous stroke. Each stroke is a single undoable action.
Park needles by cell corner, with a live count, a list and a jump straight to each one.
Pattern progress, remaining colours, section map, today's pulse, streak, hourly pace and session history.
Every DMC with its remaining stitches. Tap to highlight it on the canvas, sort, hide finished, and jump to the next cell in that colour.
SEC anchors the counts to the active section; CROSS highlights one thread across the entire pattern even as you move around.
An L-shaped ruler and a tinted 5×5 block follow the active cell so you never lose the row.
The whole pattern with the same tools: mark, park, stats, undo, and tap to focus a section.
«I changed thread here». Up to 500 characters per section, saved automatically and synced with your progress.
Jump to the pattern centre, to an exact coordinate, or to any bookmark you saved.
Choose how finished stitches read: lighten what's pending towards the fabric tone, or desaturate what's already stitched.
With the phone on a stand, volume up adds a stitch and volume down undoes it. The screen stays awake.
Once the crosses are done, a checklist groups backstitch and knots by colour to close the project.
Two fingers undo, three fingers redo, in any view, with on-screen confirmation.
Chart Editor
Edit a pattern you already have, or start one from scratch on an empty canvas. It's a core piece of TRAMA, with the kind of tooling you'd expect from a desktop program.
Any pattern exports as an image with its thread and fabric, to show how it will look before the first stitch.
Catrina
With backstitch over the face paint
Still life with cat
With TRAMA on a book's spine
Van Gogh
A self-portrait, in cross stitch
The reader
Backstitch draws the fine lines
The café
The whole piece, on its fabric
Up close
Every cross with its sheen, and the backstitch on top
The harbour
A landscape, edge to edge
Oil portrait
The painting's light, in thread
In the studio
120 × 180 stitches · 21.8 × 32.7 cm on 14-count Aida
Every pattern on this page was made with TRAMA, start to finish, by someone who is not a designer.
Importer
Almost every pattern is sold as a PDF, and TRAMA opens them: it reads the symbols, the floss key and the grid, and hands the chart back to you built. It also opens the original file, if your designer gave you one, and even a photo or an image of the chart. Once inside, that pattern is stitched with Follow Along and edited in the Chart Editor like any other.
The one you bought on Etsy or on your designer's site: one page or twenty, in colour or in black and white. TRAMA reads more and more kinds of PDF — the ones that come out of the programs designers work in, and the ones each shop puts together its own way — and rebuilds the chart with the real DMC colours, not with approximations.
Some designers hand you the file from the program they used. TRAMA opens six: .trama, .oxs, .fcjson, .pat, .xsd and .embproj. Nothing to guess there: stitches, threads, halves and quarters, backstitch and knots all come in exactly as they were.
Is the chart a JPG you found somewhere, or a few photos you took of a magazine? That goes in too. The photos are gathered into a PDF, one per page, and TRAMA offers to straighten and crop them; if it needs to, you mark the corners of the chart yourself.
TRAMA doesn't pass off what it didn't see clearly. When it's done, it tells you whether the chart was read in full, whether you should compare it with your pattern, or whether something is missing: a thread still to choose, one from another brand without its DMC, a few cells it didn't recognise. And what's missing doesn't stop you from starting to stitch.
What it can tell you
A scanned magazine, a few photos or a PDF that stores the chart as a picture can't always be read cell by cell reliably. For those, TRAMA opens your own PDF: the page stays sharp at any zoom, TRAMA lays a grid over it and you mark what you stitch as you go. Your progress is saved with the project.
One tap marks the cell you've stitched. With “Paint”, drag a finger and every cell it passes over gets marked.
Drag from one point of the grid to another and the line snaps to the corners of the cells on its own.
Tap the cell where you leave your threaded needle, pick the corner, and you'll find them all in the tools.
Your PDF's key on its own page: open it, check it and go back to the chart without losing your place.
If your chart spans several pages, you move between them and each one keeps its own marks.
Tap a thread and its cells light up. If TRAMA doesn't know yet which symbol each thread has, you show it by tapping it in the printed key.
It's experimental: it's new and we're still testing it, so you may come across rough edges. If something doesn't line up, let us know.
The format patterns are swapped in today is from 2011 and cannot hold half of what a pattern has: if yours carries two threads in the same needle, backstitch in different weights, smyrna or the fabric you chose, it all drops on the way out. So we made the .trama file, which keeps the whole pattern — including how far you had stitched and who designed it. It is open and published: any program can read it without asking us.
No program reads a hundred per cent of PDFs properly: every shop exports its own way. That's why TRAMA has a reporting system built in. We don't ask for the pattern — it's yours and your designer's, and its licence is for personal use — only for a technical report on how the file is built. Every report is read by a person on the team and answered to your account email. We're going to keep improving it, always.
Export
The Pro Pattern PDF is built the way professional programs build theirs, so you can print it and work on paper whenever you feel like it.
Name, size in stitches, recommended Aida fabric, strands and a materials summary.
The whole pattern in miniature with grid and ruler, and the page number where each area is enlarged.
The enlarged chart with a symbol and colour per stitch, absolute coordinates in the header, and a legend for that page's colours.
Neighbouring pages repeat two columns and two rows, so the printed sheets line up.
Numbering every 5 or 10 stitches aligned with the heavy grid lines, and a unique symbol per colour to tell similar threads apart.
Every DMC in the pattern with its code, plus a palette PDF, chart PNG and progress snapshot.
Threads and materials
Stop buying the same thread twice.
Point the camera at a real skein and TRAMA tells you its DMC code.
Your skeins, how many are left and where you keep them, synced across devices.
What you're missing for the next project, ready to take to the shop.
Fabric, strands and price per skein: how many you actually need and what it will cost, before you buy.
Your story
TRAMA doesn't only count stitches: it keeps what it was like to make them. A calendar with your streak, entries by day and by project, and everything that surrounded that session.
What you were watching, what you were listening to, what you were drinking and how you felt. You'll thank yourself years from now.
Your pattern growing stitch by stitch, as a GIF or video, square or vertical 9:16, with milestones at 25, 50, 75 and 100%.
Which areas you stitched first and which came later, across the whole pattern.
An image of the pattern as it stands, ready to attach to the journal or share.
You schedule them, with their day, time and message. TRAMA never pings you on its own.
If you publish the project, you choose which journal entries are visible and which stay only yours.
New Temperature patterns
Pick your city and a year, and TRAMA turns each day's temperature into a stitch of colour. What comes out isn't a chart of stripes: it's a real pattern, built on a hand-drawn design, that you stitch with Follow Along, touch up in the Chart Editor and export to PDF like any other. Your year, to keep or to give.
One day, one colour
Search for your city and pick the year: the one you were born, the one you met, or the one under way. A past year arrives all at once.
Each day becomes a cross on a calendar, a book on a shelf or a cat, in the colour of its temperature. Choose the design, palette, fabric and frame, and see it straight away.
It becomes a project like any other: you stitch it with Follow Along, the calculator tells you how many skeins you need, and the PDF carries its temperature key.
Every design is drawn by hand, with the year and your city stitched in, and each piece carries a real city's weather. And there are more on the way.
Waves
Kyoto · 2025
Stained glass
Seville · 2025
Cats
Madrid · 2025
Constellation sky
Reykjavík · 2025
Diamond mandala
Oaxaca · 2025
Tree of seasons
Buenos Aires · 2025
Pantry jars
Lisbon · 2025
Rose window
Granada · 2025
Piano score
Vienna · 2025
City skyline
New York · 2025
“See it stitched” paints your piece with its fabric, its thread and its backstitch before you make the first stitch.
You see all of it in the preview before you create the project.
Rainbow, Ocean, Autumn… or only the threads you own, cold to warm.
Whichever you prefer, or each day split into two halves.
A border, the year and your city, and a dedication: “FOR MUM”.
Each thread with its temperature range, stitched beside the piece.
A birthday or the first snow, with its knot and its memory.
Rain, snow or full sun: a bead, a white knot or a golden one.
Your city and your sister's in one piece, under a single key.
From the day your baby was born, or your wedding, to its anniversary.
Live
Choose the current year and every morning TRAMA brings in yesterday's colour from your city's real weather, so your piece reveals itself day by day. If you like, “Today's stitch” gives you a nudge; take a break and you pause it, and it comes back on its own. And when a month is complete, its memory goes into the journal and its card is ready to share.
Your life
One stripe for every year, from the year you were born (or your mother, or your partner) to the last complete one, in the colour of its mean temperature in your city. Like Ed Hawkins' warming stripes, but in thread: cream is a year like your average; blue, colder; red, warmer. As a band to frame or as a bookmark.
And this is only the start. Temperature patterns are an open feature: new designs will keep arriving, and more ways to make your piece your own.
Data: Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0)Community
Publish your project and let other people follow how it grows — or take inspiration from theirs.
With a title, description and tags for difficulty, subject, occasion, size and style so people can find you.
Explore what the community publishes, save what inspires you, and come back to it when you start something new.
React to and comment on other people's progress, with content reports for when something isn't right.
You decide whether other people can make their own editable copy of your pattern, or only view it.
Stitch the same piece as a group, with a weekly calendar, members, shared progress and a message wall.
A simple ranking by stitches marked in Follow Along, with a podium and your global position.
Sync
Patterns, progress, inventory, journal, bookmarks, parking and notes are backed up to our backend while you're signed in. Lose your phone or switch tablets and your work is still there when you sign back in. A few things stay on the device on purpose, like the Follow Along activity log.
FAQ
Phone and tablet, on both iOS and Android. On a large screen the Chart Editor and Follow Along use the full canvas: on a landscape tablet the tools move to a side rail and a palette panel with live counts appears.
It's the standard numbering system from the French brand DMC: it works as a unique address for every thread shade, so 310 is the same black in Madrid as it is in Tokyo. TRAMA always works against the official catalogue and never invents a thread you can't buy.
Full cross, backstitch with configurable strands and stroke, fractional stitches (half, quarter, three-quarter and petit), French knots, beads, Smyrna, long stitch and two-thread blends. All on the same grid, so it looks the same in the editor, in Follow Along and in the PDF.
Yes, if the PDF carries its symbols as text along with a floss key, which is the norm for shop patterns: one page or several, in colour or in black and white. When it's done, TRAMA tells you how sure it is of what it read and what's missing, if anything. If the PDF is a scan, a few photos or stores the chart as a picture and can't be read reliably, you can stitch on your own PDF, marking the cells yourself (it's experimental). And if your designer gave you the original file — .oxs, .fcjson, .pat, .xsd, .embproj or .trama — that one goes in with nothing to guess. If something fails, the app prepares a technical report on the file — we never ask for the pattern itself — and someone on the team reviews it.
A pattern where every day of the year is a stitch — or a book, a wave, a cat — in the colour of the temperature that day in your city. When you finish it, you have your whole year in thread: a keepsake, or a gift. In TRAMA you choose the city, the year and the design, and you stitch it with Follow Along like any other pattern.
From Open-Meteo, an open weather data service (CC BY 4.0 licence). There is daily data going back to 1940, so you can stitch the year you were born. With the current year, TRAMA brings in yesterday each morning, because today's high isn't final yet. And once a day has its colour, it never changes.
Not to stitch. The pattern, the counter and your inventory work on the device. The cloud is there so your progress, projects and threads follow you between devices, and for the social side. Temperature patterns do need it, to fetch your city's weather.
Yes. While you're signed in, your patterns, progress, inventory and journal sync on their own: start on the tablet on the sofa and carry on with the phone, without exporting or importing anything by hand.
No. Everything is private until you choose to publish it, and when you publish you decide which journal entries are visible and whether other people can make an editable copy of your pattern.
Seventeen: Spanish, English, Catalan, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Polish, Hungarian, Turkish, Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
Build the pattern, stitch it with Follow Along, and keep the story of how you made it.
Coming soon to the App Store and Google Play