#samplerbot

[samplerbot]

DMC Color Key: ■ 304 Red Medium ■ 3740 Antique Violet Dark ■ 434 Brown Light ■ 957 Geranium Pale ■ B5200 Snow White

Dimensions: 147 by 99 stitches. Font: 'Talk-to-three-headed-monkey.ttf' by Marco Milone. Border: Original Work.

beep! beep! I'm a bot that makes samplers out of tumblr posts and my own custom and vintage borders. Patterns uploaded here (when my creator has the time).

sundays rule number 1: DON'T THINK ABOUT YOUR LIFE

[samplerbot]

Update notes: another batch of pattern PDFs is up! Regular versions + Pattern Keeper ones.

I also fixed a math error in the DMC color-calculating function.

Actually, math moment incoming:

The bot gets its colors from the PyPalettes library, which is designed primarily for people who want to make good-looking scatterplots and bar graphs. It has a couple thousand color palettes in it, and the bot takes one at random and uses its colors when it makes a sampler.

To convert those colors into DMC ones, it takes each sampler color's RGB colors (like '0, 0, 0' for black, or '255, 255, 255' for white) and treats each as essentially a 3D coordinate-- like with 'x, y, z' coordinates. Then it checks to find which of the existing DMC threads has color coordinates that are closest to it in that 3D space using the distance formula:

√((x₂-x₁)² + (y₂-y₁)² + (z₂-z₁)²)

(if you've made it to high school math, you should recognize this! it's the same as the regular 2D distance formula, but with three variables).

(also the bot doesn't actually bother with the square root, since it doesn't care what the distance is, just which possible distance is smallest).

Anyway I messed it up the first time, and had it cube the binomials instead of square them, which led to some kinda wack negative stuff happening. The effect on the samplers wasn't noticeable, except that some of the samplers had less-harmonious color palettes than they might have.

So-- the samplers might be a little prettier from here on out! Or possibly similarly-pretty, but the math that makes them is nicer, at least. :)

I have some big ideas for things I'd like to add next, but life keeps me busy~

And as always, feel free to @ the bot if you see any cool posts!

[samplerbot]

If there were two guys on the moon and one of them killed the other with a rock would that be fucked up or what?

[samplerbot]

the pattern repository has been brought up to date!

and, uh, I gotta not wait so long between updates next time-- this was a LOT of patterns to make, even with WinStitch doing the heavy lifting. 😅 One of the eventual goals is for Samplerbot to be able to make its own PDFs, but that's still a long ways out from here.

I also added two more borders, and did some research into color matching that may someday pay off-- Samplerbot is using a DMC-to-hex-color table that's widely available online (threadcolors.com has one version of it, though none of the instances I've found have any kind of attribution listed), but if I ever have the opportunity I'd prefer to make my own.

I'm considering getting a Pantone color book via interlibrary loan, then putting both it and the threads in direct sunlight and matching that way-- so converting DMC -> Pantone color -> hex color. Not a perfect system, but I think it could work well enough.

Requests/messages will be answered over the weekend! Thanks as always for chilling with the bot. :)

[samplerbot]

DMC Color Key: ■ 322 Baby Blue Dark ■ 334 Baby Blue Medium ■ 762 Pearl Gray Very Light ■ B5200 Snow White

Dimensions: 199 by 257 stitches. Font: 'Piacevoli.ttf' by jeti. Border: Original Work.

beep! beep! I'm a bot that makes samplers out of tumblr posts and my own custom and vintage borders. Patterns uploaded here (when my creator has the time).

“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

[samplerbot]

happy pride , !!

[samplerbot]

Update notes: no longer just a pixelartbot-- Samplerbot is stitching!

This is a BIG update, both aesthetically and in terms of functionality: the new code makes it possible for samplerbot to convert one of its pixel art samplers into a numerical matrix, and then use that matrix to generate a mockup of what the sampler might look like stitched.

Also it can do colored fabrics now! And I fixed the antialiasing glitch and added about a dozen fonts.

The mockup generator was VERY fiddly to get right. The cliff's notes: it has three large fabric tile sprites (black, white, and colorizable) and six stitch tiles. Everything in the samplers is aligned on a 15x15 pixel grid, but the stitch tiles themselves are 19x19, with 2px of overlap on all sides-- which makes the stitches look compact and cozy when in a big block, but full and properly X-shaped when they're standalone.

(stole that idea from Cross Stitch Master, Jeff Tullin's old Amiga patternmaker from '92. good stuff!)

Each of the six stitches has three parts: a high-contrast, high-saturation base image, a black-and-white overlay image, and a special mask for the overlay. There's also a generic shadow image that goes on as a multiply layer underneath the stitches.

The base images are from a scanned physical pattern, and are recolored by the program to match any given DMC color. The recoloring washes out the contrast, though, so the overlay (with its mask) adds those highlights and deep shadows (and textures) back in. The effect is still artificial-looking, especially up close, but it's beautiful, and that's what counts. :)

A comparison between Samplerbot, WinStitch, PCStitch, and FlossCross's stitched preview options:

You can see that Jeff's fabric mockup is still leagues better than mine (and I'm cheating a bit by emulating a vague 28ct instead of Aida), and FlossCross's is too, but if you don't look too close I think Samplerbot's still looks super. Straight up, not to sound boastful, but-- I think it looks fantastic.

Aight, that's enough chatter. I'm so incredibly proud of this update. Hope you guys like the pretty pictures. :)

[samplerbot]

[samplerbot]

samplerbot glitch gallery

not actually a glitch! but the first output of the first draft of the mockup-making function. it's come a long way in the last 24 hours.

output from an early draft of the recoloring function (fix: switched from a hacky PIL method to this library, then adjusted levels and the base textures until everything gelled.)

glitch in the function that chooses text colors (fix: corrected how the bot calculates perceived luminance)

font error (no fix yet; just affects this font. it's an antialiasing error, will investigate later.)

[samplerbot]

The PDF pattern repository has been updated! It is now up-to-date on all patterns.

The next significant bot update should be ready to go live by the New Year; I've been completely overhauling the function that handles border spacing and line length, which isn't very flashy but does create noticeably more balanced designs. And also a few fun glitches!

The first two are actually very beautiful to me-- when I have time, I may see if I can build in an option for the bot to create designs like that on purpose.

[samplerbot]

this might be the new best account on tumblr

[samplerbot]

Quick update: the PDF gallery is not fully up-to-date, but it is closer! I knocked out a few patterns in-between work stuff this last week, and hope to get the rest patternified in the upcoming week. :)

Requests are also partially-but-not-fully-processed-- any request sent in via a mention/@ (the preferred way! the bot's processes are designed to work best with existing posts) have all been either posted or are in the queue now, but nothing in the ask box has been looked at yet.

Have a lovely night, Tumblr! 🌜☁️🐄

[samplerbot]

thank you so much for existing!!!

[samplerbot]

Happy New Year, everyone! A new year, a new Samplerbot update~

The big centering and spacing update is now live: it's a full overhaul of how the bot chooses line lengths, calculates border sizes, and matches fonts with different-sized borders, and it should result in more harmonious compositions across the board. Not super flashy, but I am quite happy with it. :)

I also added a handful of new borders (up to 122 now), about half original and half archival-- including one from the 1500s! Excited for that to show up in a sampler sometime.

And, of course, the Ko-fi page has been updated too, with PDFs aplenty for those that want them!

Happy new year, all, and thanks for checking out the bot ✌️

[samplerbot]

DMC Color Key: ■ 18 Yellow Plum ■ 3 Tin Medium ■ 3761 Sky Blue Light ■ 581 Moss Green ■ 814 Garnet Dark ■ 825 Blue Dark

Dimensions: 126 by 126 stitches. Font: 'Pixel Times.ttf' by Daymarius. Border: Original Work.

beep! beep! I'm a bot that makes samplers out of tumblr posts and my own custom and vintage borders. Patterns uploaded here (when my creator has the time).

what will it be, boss? the comfort of misery or the pain of change?

[samplerbot]

I love you sampler bot 💕