Marking Off Cross Stitch: Markup Apps, Trackers and Keeping Your Place

Losing your place is the single most common frustration in cross stitch, and it gets worse the bigger the piece. You put a project down for a fortnight, pick it back up, and spend twenty minutes working out which of those near-identical grey squares you had already done.

Everyone solves this somehow. Here is what the options actually look like.

The paper methods

For decades the answer was a printout and something to mark it with.

• Highlighter. Colour over each block as you finish it. Fast, but permanent, so a mistake means reprinting the page. Highlighter also obscures the symbols underneath, which is a problem when you need to check something.
• Pencil crossing off. Reversible, but slow and easy to smudge.
• Transparent overlay. A sheet of acetate over the chart, marked with a wipe-clean pen. Better, and popular for a long time, but fiddly to keep aligned.
• Magnetic board with a line marker. Keeps you on the right row rather than tracking individual stitches. Good for smaller charts, less so for anything with scattered colour.

These all work. They also mean printing dozens of pages for a large design, keeping them in order, and carrying them about.

Why marking off digitally took over

A chart on a screen can do something paper cannot: it can remember.

Mark a stitch as done and it stays done, on every device, without you maintaining anything. The chart fills in as you work, so at a glance you can see what is finished and what is left. Zoom in when the symbols get dense, zoom out to see the whole design. Nothing to print, nothing to lose, nothing to realign.

The community calls these tools all sorts of things, which makes them oddly hard to search for. Markup apps, mark up apps, pattern markers, stitch trackers, progress trackers. They are all describing the same job.

What to look for

Not all of them do the same things well. The features that matter in practice:

• Marking speed. You should be able to mark a run of stitches or a whole block, not tap each square individually. On a big design that difference is hours.
• Colour filtering. When you are working one shade, being able to isolate it makes the chart far easier to read.
• Backstitch and knots. Plenty of trackers only handle whole stitches, then leave you back on paper for the backstitch and French knots at the end.
• Working offline. Stitching happens on sofas, in gardens and on trains. If the tool stops when the signal does, it is not much use.
• Device support. A lot of the best known markup software is Android only, which is no help at all on an iPad.

Progress you can actually see

The better trackers do more than remember. They will tell you what percentage of the design is complete, how many stitches remain in each colour, and how long you have been going.

Some go further and project a finish date from your own stitching rate, which is a more honest answer to "when will this be done" than any generic estimate. It also has a way of encouraging you along, since a large project stops feeling endless once you can see it converging.

HobbyTub does this in the pattern tracker: tap stitches off, watch the chart fill, and see a projected completion date based on how you actually work rather than how fast someone else stitches.

Does going digital mean giving up paper?

Not necessarily, and plenty of people use both. A printed chart is still the easiest thing to scribble a note on, and some stitchers simply prefer paper in the hand.

If you like printing, print well: the right scale, the right page breaks, and symbols that survive a monochrome printer. We covered that in printing a cross stitch pattern, or going paperless.

A few habits that help regardless

Whatever you mark with, these make losing your place much less likely.

• Work in blocks. Finish a 10 by 10 square before moving on, rather than wandering across the design.
• Grid your fabric. Ten by ten gridding on the fabric matches the chart and catches errors early. See how to grid your fabric.
• Stop at a sensible point. Finishing mid-block is how you lose twenty minutes next time.
• Mark as you go, not afterwards. Marking a whole session's work from memory at the end is how mistakes creep in.

Try it on something you are already stitching

If you have a project on the go, that is the best test. Import the PDF you are stitching from, mark off what you have already done, and see whether the running count and the finished-date estimate change how the piece feels.

You can mark up a PDF chart you bought or track any project stitch by stitch in HobbyTub on any device, or browse the pattern library if you would rather start something new.