About

Hi, I’m Åsa!

I’m a software developer living and working from my home in the small town of Mjölby in Sweden. When I’m not glued to my computer or embroidery frame I love to read and play with my kids.

Story of Pattern Keeper

I have been cross-stitching on and off since I was 7 years old. In 2009 I bought my first really big project, a Heaven and Earth design, and was immediately frustrated trying to follow the paper pattern. I had never done a design with so many colors and I kept finding stitches I missed and placed in the wrong place. I know many of you will recognize the struggle. I started gridding, restarted the project on a different fabric, and bought a PDF version of my pattern but I was still struggling. I tried a couple of different PDF readers but they felt slow and bulky and scrolling between pages was a pain.

And then I had the typical engineer moment when you tire and think to yourself: I can do something that works better than this!

I started with great enthusiasm and created something that worked well enough for me. It was horribly ugly and importing a chart took hours. To move to view a different part of the chart you had to edit a text file and restart the software. It was not until some time later when I showed my invention to a friend who also cross-stitches and watched her get green with jealousy that I realized that others probably also had the same problem.

I started thinking about how I could make a version that could be easily shared and be easy enough for anyone to use and the rest is history. Pattern Keeper was published on Google Play in the autumn of 2019.