Engineering Notes · side project · QuietBookCut
Four months ago I built a small tool for my sister, to save her days of tracing patterns by hand. It has since grown into QuietBookCut, a bunch of converters and a designer for anyone who owns a cutting machine. Building it was honestly the easy part, telling the people who need it that it even exists, that has been the hard part.
My sister makes quiet books. I showed some interest in her hobby one day (as a brother should), and was honestly shocked at how much manual work goes into getting just one book ready.
If you have never seen a quiet book, it is a fabric (usually felt) book for toddlers, where every page is a little activity, a zip that opens a mouth, buttons to do up, apples that come off a tree, a clock with hands that turn. They are lovely things, and they take ages to make.
It starts with a pattern you buy as a PDF, which is hand-drawn line art with handwritten notes scribbled next to the pieces ("light blue", "cut 2", "fold here"). If you own a Cricut or a Silhouette, the machine can cut all those felt pieces for you, perfectly, but only once someone has traced every single piece into an SVG cut file. By hand. Piece by piece, colour by colour, page by page, pulling each one out of the PDF manually. For my sister that was sometimes 2, 3, maybe 4 days of tracing for one book, before the machine could cut a thing.
And she is not the only one. A crafter on a sewing forum summed it up nicely, cutting and marking the pattern pieces takes longer than actually making the thing.
So, I opened up Claude and built her a tool. The first commit was on 9 July, and that tool is now quietbookcut.com.
The first version did one job. Upload the PDF, an AI model reads the handwritten notes, the line art gets traced, and you get cut files grouped by colour with each piece named, ready for the machine. Days of tracing -> a few minutes and a coffee.
Once my sister had it, the requests started coming in, as they do. Can it do pictures, not just PDFs? Can I design my own pages? My SVG imports at the wrong size, can you fix that? Four months later it looks like this:
Files come out for Cricut Design Space, Silhouette Studio, Brother ScanNCut and laser software, there is an Android app, you get free credits every month, and you do not need a card to sign up.
And as I am writing this, my AI is busy coding out the next one, leather craft, because a user asked for it. Which is pretty much how a lot of these tools came about.
Not everything worked. For a while I had a "Pattern Maker", basically you pick a story and the AI plans and draws the whole quiet book for you. It sort of worked, technically, but it was the wrong idea, and I pulled it out.
A quiet book is a creative thing. Where the zip goes, which branch comes off, what the lion's mane feels like, that is the maker's call, and it is the fun part. AI is bad at that, but it is really good at drawing a clean shape a machine can cut. There is also a real (and fair) feeling in craft communities about AI replacing the people who make things, and I did not want to be that guy.
So the designer flips it around. The human designs the book, the AI only makes the pieces they ask for. Turned out to be a much better product, and a LOT easier to explain.
Lesson learnt: let the AI do the tedious part, and leave the creative part with the person who actually enjoys it.
Ok, so this is the part nobody warns you about.
Crafters are not on LinkedIn, and they are not googling "vector conversion". They are in Facebook groups and subreddits, lots of them, big and very active, and that is where the questions get asked ("how do I get this pattern into Design Space?"), which is exactly where my tool would help.
Almost every one of those groups has a no self-promotion rule, and honestly, I get it. Without that rule they would drown in spam within a week, and I would leave too. But it does mean the people who would get the most out of QuietBookCut are sitting in rooms where I am not allowed to say its name.
It gets a bit more interesting. A good number of these groups are run by people who sell their own designs and patterns, and since QuietBookCut has a designer, one moderator told me straight out that I am in direct competition. Fair enough, their group, their rules. So, good luck to me then ;)
The usual answer is "just pay an SEO company". I looked into that. From what I have seen, a lot of what gets sold as SEO for small niches is AI-generated forum questions, answered by AI-generated "users" who just happen to recommend your link (yes, that seems to be a thing). In a niche this small the regulars spot that straight away, it is not something I want my name on, and it does not get into the groups where crafters actually talk anyway.
The niche problem: the smaller and friendlier the community, the better it is guarded, and the less any paid shortcut will work.
No magic answer here, just a lot of small things, done slowly:
It is slow. Word of mouth in a craft niche gets earned one person at a time, and I am ok with that, but it does mean a post like this one matters more than you would think.
This blog is mostly about how I run AI coding agents on client work, so a quick look under the hood (feel free to skip to the end).
If you have read this far, you most likely know someone with a Cricut, a Silhouette or a ScanNCut. Your mum, your partner, the colleague who makes the office birthday banners, the friend whose kid has a quiet book. Send them quietbookcut.com. The SVG checker is free, signing up is free, and they get free credits every month to try the rest.
Or just share this post. Right now, that is basically the whole marketing plan.
I use my tooling predominantly on Mage-OS (Adobe Commerce / Magento) e-commerce projects, and my own AI Booking Agent. If you have not swapped to Mage-OS yet, you are falling behind ;)