The short answer is: I don’t have an iPhone. Or an iPod Touch.

Nope, really, that’s about it.

The slightly longer answer is that I could develop for Android for a (low) one-time fee, while Apple charges money annually to distribute apps on their platform. This is a labor of love for me, not something that’s going to make me money. I’d rather it not cost me a lot, though.

If you’re an iOS developer who’d like to talk about how to make your app work with mine, I’m more than happy to talk. Otherwise you can investigate one of the other apps out there on iOS for managing cross stitch stash. From my reading, it seems X-stitch does many of the same things my app does.

Kitted is a term commonly used in cross stitching groups to describe the process of gathering all the materials you need to stitch a pattern. It’s used in the app to indicate patterns that you want to have the materials on hand for, in order to produce the shopping list.

Nope. Being able to do that would require me to have a database full of that information, which would take up more room on your phone. There’s a bunch of other apps out there that do provide conversions, if that’s something you’re interested in.

That being said, if you routinely stitch in a particular brand of floss that is not DMC (as an example), there are a few tricks that you can use to allow you to import patterns using DMC colors and display what you need in your preferred brand. The app will compare the number portion of the code independent of what comes after it, if possible – so you could put in the floss list as DMC with the equivalent listed after the color code. For example: “DMC 310 – Sullivans 45053.” Then any pattern that calls for DMC 310 would show you the corresponding Sullivans code on the screen as well.

There are some downsides to this method – it won’t work well if you have both normal DMC and the other brand in your collection, and what you own will be sorted based on the DMC number, not the Sullivans number – but it would provide an easy way to see what you need without having to redo the conversion every time.

If the “in progress” checkbox is grayed out on the pattern information tab, it’s because you don’t have a fabric associated with the pattern. The start and finish dates are actually associated with the fabric (since you can stitch a pattern multiple times!) and so in order to mark the pattern as in progress, you must have a fabric.

Additionally, when you mark the pattern as “in progress,” that fabric is no longer shown on the list for choosing fabric for another pattern. (You don’t want to frog out what you’ve already done!)

You can still mark a pattern as complete without a fabric associated with it – no dates will be recorded but depending on your settings, the supplies will be deducted from your stash as normal.

What happens when you mark a pattern as complete depends on three different things: whether you have fabric associated with the project, whether you want it to update the stash for you, and whether patterns call for full skeins of thread.

If you have fabric associated with the pattern, marking the pattern as complete will note the date (although you can always adjust that from the fabric information page) and move the fabric to the “Finishes” list, displayed on the pattern information page. The fabric will no longer be considered “in stash” and disappears from the stash list as well. This happens whether or not the “update stash” setting is checked.

If you have checked the “update stash” setting, the next setting checked is whether you want full skeins of thread when kitting a pattern. If you call for full skeins when kitting, all thread called for by the pattern will be removed from the stash count. However, if you allow for overlap, only the skeins of thread in excess of one (1) will be removed from the stash. The app assumes that skein counts were rounded up and you have leftover thread that is still counted as being in the stash.

In both cases, all the embellishments called for are removed, consistent with how they are treated when using the shopping list. A dialog box congratulates you on your finish and reminds you what your settings are so you can back out in case this isn’t what you want to have happen. It’s always a good idea to check the amounts left in stash manually, as you might want to adjust from these assumptions either way.

If you prefer to keep track of your stash as you go along, simply uncheck the “Update stash” setting and it will not adjust your stash at all upon completion.

If you accidentally marked a pattern as complete, you can select the fabric from the finishes list to go to the fabric information page. On the menu there is an item “Undo Finish.” This will put the fabric back as the current fabric (removing the current fabric if you’d added another one!) and place the fabric back in the stash.

Unfortunately, there is currently no ability to undo the changes to the quantities of threads and embellishments in the stash beyond editing the quantities.

If you delete a pattern that has finishes associated with it, the information for the finishes is deleted as well. This includes the fabric that it was stitched on.

This is due to how the app stores information. If you want to remove the pattern from the stash but preserve the finish information, select “Remove From Stash” from the pattern information page instead. This will remove the pattern from the stash list but keep the information in the app so it can properly display the finishes.

That would be a really awesome feature, I agree! I wish I could even say it was coming soon, but…

Parsing the information to read it into the stash is very tricky. The app needs to know what information is important and what isn’t. That’s why the text file has to be structured just right, and I’ve written a whole page on that.

Pattern PDFs, on the other hand, are structured according to the designer’s preferences, maybe with some standard components. On top of that, there’s the information added to the file so that it is a PDF – something invisible when you open it using the right application, but the information to tell it how to display the file is stored somewhere, and that can be misread as text. (You can always try this yourself by right-clicking on a PDF and selecting “Open With…” and choosing a text editor. You’ll see a lot of gibberish!)

My app would have to parse through that gibberish, make sure that the PDF actually encodes the data as text and isn’t just the PDF of an image, and then figure out which text corresponds to which category in the stash. It’d be great if it could do that!

It also wouldn’t be free, and I would probably make a lot more money writing software. So in the meantime, the easiest way to import data from a pattern file is to open up one of the templates, type up the info yourself quickly, and then import that. If you do try to import something other than a text file, the app will let you know!

I have, indeed, finally created a Facebook page for StashCache.  You can like it, say hello, and keep up to date with any known issues there – in case something isn’t working quite as you’d like.

Come join the fun!