Make a sashiko pattern right in your browser: the Japanese running stitch, white thread on indigo cloth, drawn as waves, leaves, shells and stars. Watch it being stitched one line at a time, change the stitches and the cloth, and save it as an SVG or a PNG. No sign-up and no libraries.
Sashiko (“little stabs”) began in the farming and fishing villages of northern Japan, where layers of worn indigo cotton were stitched together with white thread to make them warmer and last longer.
- Patterns: seigaiha (blue ocean waves), asanoha (hemp leaf), shippō (seven treasures), kikkō (tortoise shell), yamagata (mountains), higaki (cypress fence), kagome (basket weave), sayagata (key fret), tatewaku (rising steam), hitomezashi (one-stitch, a new regular pattern every time) and kaki-no-hana (persimmon flower), each with its meaning.
- Stitch it: watch the pattern being stitched pass by pass (all the lines one way, then the next way), as it is done by hand.
- Stitches: stitch length, the gap where the thread runs under the cloth, thread thickness, and a slightly uneven hand-stitched look.
- Cloth: indigo, deep indigo, red thread, undyed cotton, persimmon or sumi black, with chalk guide lines and a weave texture.
- Save: Download PNG (2000 pixels square) or Download SVG. The address of the page keeps the design, to share it.
Click a pattern to open it in the app.
 Seigaiha 青海波 Blue ocean waves |  Asanoha 麻の葉 Hemp leaf |  Shippō 七宝 Seven treasures |  Kikkō 亀甲 Tortoise shell |
 Yamagata 山形 Mountains |  Higaki 檜垣 Cypress fence |  Kagome 籠目 Basket weave |  Sayagata 紗綾形 Key fret |
 Tatewaku 立涌 Rising steam |  Hitomezashi 一目刺し One-stitch |  Kaki-no-hana 柿の花 Persimmon flower |
Every pattern is a set of lines (straight, zigzag or curved) grouped in passes. The seigaiha fans are circles hidden wherever a fan of the next row covers them; shippō is made of waves of quarter circles; asanoha is a triangle grid with three spokes in every triangle, chained into zigzags. Each line is then cut into running stitches fitted to every straight run, so a stitch always ends right on a corner. Sayagata is a grid of manji whose arms run on into long lines, drawn on the diagonal; tatewaku is pairs of waves in opposite phase. In hitomezashi every stitch is one square long, and each row and column starts on a stitch or a gap, following a short mirrored rhythm shared by rows and columns: a random one for hitomezashi, so every new pattern is regular and symmetric, or the fixed rhythm that makes kaki-no-hana.
Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with no dependencies and no build step. Just open index.html. It is also a small installable web app that works offline.
- The whole thing is in
js/sashiko.js(source). - The three color themes (dark, light and blue) are shared with my other projects, copied from omg-themes (
npm run sync:themesrefreshes them).
Sashiko-Maker is open source at GitHub with MIT license.
Had fun browsing the app? Buy me a coffee by becoming a sponsor.
You may also be interested in Kumiko-Maker (demo), Kolam-Maker (demo) and Celtic-Knot-Maker (demo). For more mystic arts as small web apps, see Esoterica.
Copyright (c) 2026 Olivier Giulieri.