PEmbroider

PEmbroider was developed during Endless March 2020 at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry by Golan Levin, Lingdong Huang, and Tatyana Mustakos, with generous support from an anonymous donor and the Clinic for Open Source Arts (COSA) at the University of Denver.

Intended primarily for artists, craftspersons, educators, makers, and schools, PEmbroider is free, open-source software released under both the GNU General Public Licence (GPLv3) and the Anti-Capitalist Software License (ACSL 1.4). It includes file-writing code adapted from the EmbroidePy EmbroideryIO project under EmbroidePy’s MIT License. 

Other embroidery software for creating custom embroidery designs, which frequently cost thousands of dollars, is rarely cross-platform, and is seldom open-source. Most free and open-source tools which do exist are not integrated easily with popular “creative coding” toolkits, nor do they easily allow for the creation of generative and computational designs. PEmbroider, by contrast, is a free, cross-platform, open-source, lightweight Java library for generative embroidery design. It integrates with the popular Processing creative coding framework, providing ready access to a vast and diverse ecosystem of functionality, including high-quality typography, live interaction, motion capture, computer vision, GIS cartography, physics simulation, and much more.

PEmbroider has various examples demonstrating how to achieve different sorts of embroidery effects with lines, shapes, typography, images, and more. Artists used this software to produce creative experimentation and multimedia animations. Check out artist David Perry’s embroidered animation experiments and other work-in-progress images from the development of the PEmbroider library! 

(Work in Process Image of David Perry’s embroidered animation experiments)

(Tatiana Mustakos Work in Process Images of the STUDIO)