About Turtlestitch

TurtleStitch is a free and open-source web platform for creating, sharing, and remixing embroidery patterns through code. Built on Snap! it combines block-based programming with textile craft, allowing users to design stitch patterns directly in the browser and export them for embroidery machines.

TurtleStitch requires no prior programming experience, making it accessible to beginners while still offering powerful possibilities for complex generative designs. Its visual approach helps learners explore computing, mathematics, geometry, design, and digital fabrication in a playful and tangible way.

TurtleStitch is used worldwide in schools, workshops, maker spaces, artistic projects, and community settings. It supports learners of all ages and backgrounds in creating beautiful designs — as gifts, as personal statements, as forms of public expression, or simply as objects of aesthetic delight.

At its heart, TurtleStitch is about more than producing embroidery patterns. It brings together imagination and analysis, hands and tools, code and fabric. In a time when technologies can feel distant or dehumanising, TurtleStitch offers a way to reconnect technology with creativity, making, learning, and human exchange.

The platform is sustained by a welcoming, diverse, and global community. Through open tools, open learning, and open participation, TurtleStitch invites people to create, remix, share, and learn from one another. It continues a long tradition of connecting art, craft, computing, and mathematics, while opening space for new forms of expression and collaboration.

Based on:

 

Source Code

Turlestitch is Free Software. Find its source code on GitHub: Turtlestitch
The Cloud platform is also Free Software. You can also find it on GitHub: TurtleNest

Credits Turtlestitch

Project Lead: Andrea Mayr-Stalder
Lead Developer: Michael Aschauer
Core Contributor: Simon Mong 
Cloud Platform UI/UX Designer: Tina Hochkogler

Kindly supported by:

OSEDA

Vienna University Children’s Office

Awarded for:

The Best Open Educational Resource in the German-speaking countries (2017).

Previous fundings

  TurtleStitch's initial version and latest update were funded by netidee.at

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No824630

 

In 2018, TurtleStitch was successfully funded through a Kickstarter campaign