The Thread Estimator · A Stitcher's Tool

Know how much thread to bring home before you fall in love with a canvas.

There are two kinds of stitchers: those who have run out of thread four rows from the finish, and those who are about to.

The Thread Estimator is a calculator built for painted canvas needlepoint. Tell it the size of your canvas, the mesh, the stitch you favor, and roughly how the colors divide — twenty percent navy, ten percent blanc, and so on. It returns a proper shopping list: yards and skeins, color by color, in the thread you actually intend to use.

It accounts for the things that matter:

• Mono canvas from 10 to 18 mesh, plus Penelope 10/20 — with petit point set color by color, the way it is actually stitched
• Your stitch: basketweave, continental, half cross, or mosaic, each consuming what it consumes
• Your thread: tapestry wool, Persian wool, silk, wool–silk blend, or stranded cotton, each converted to skeins at its own length
• Your tension. An adjustable overage runs from 10 percent (brave) to 30 percent (serene), and a calibration mode learns your hand from projects you have already finished, then adjusts every estimate to match it

That last part is the quiet luxury of the thing. Enter one or two finished canvases — their size, mesh, stitch, and the yardage you truly went through — and the Estimator stops guessing about an average stitcher and starts calculating for you.

How it arrives. Instantly, as a single file that opens in any browser on your computer, tablet, or phone. No account, no app, no subscription, no internet required once it is yours. It will work in the shop, at the lake, and at thirty thousand feet.

A note on honesty: every estimate is an estimate. Hand-painted canvases, decorative stitches, and a generous hand will all nudge the numbers. When in doubt, buy the extra skein. Dye lots wait for no one.

What's included

• The Thread Estimator (one HTML file, yours to keep)
• Lifetime use on your own devices
• Built-in calibration that improves with every project you feed it

Personal Use License. Your purchase grants you, the purchaser, a lifetime license to use The Thread Estimator for your personal stitching and planning, on any devices you own. The tool, its design, and its text are © 2026 Heather Rae Atelier, all rights reserved. The file may not be resold, redistributed, shared, republished, posted online, or incorporated into another product or service, in whole or in part. Shop owners and finishers interested in commercial or in-shop use are warmly invited to inquire: we offer a separate license for that. As with all digital goods, sales are final.