It all started by us making "quilts" at restaurants
When my kid was young enough to need crayons to survive a long dinner, we had a ritual. We'd flip the paper menu to the blank side, draw a grid, and we'd take turns filling in squares: little scenes, doodles, whatever.
No rules except stay in your square.
By the time the food arrived we'd have something collective (and random): part coherent, part chaos, with squares sometimes related to the last one.
I've thought about that ritual, as time has passed and the crayons went away. It was slow. It was constrained. It required turn-taking, which meant you had to wait, which meant the anticipation was part of the thing.
Then, I thought I'd try to capture that in an app.
The obvious first version involves a drawing canvas. Tap a square, sketch something, submit. But a canvas that works well across devices (being responsive, touch-friendly, pressure-sensitive enough to be fun) is a hard UI problem, and building this alone, and barely having any time to myself, I didn't want to get blocked on that.
So I made the pragmatic call: image upload only. Draw on paper and photograph it. Generate something in Midjourney. Take a screenshot. An old pic. Whatever. The constraint is the grid and the turn order; the input method doesn't matter.
That's Patchwork. You create a quilt: pick a title, choose a grid size (3×3 to 5×5), share an invite link, and collaborators claim and fill squares asynchronously at their own pace. Squares are visible as they're filled, so the thing builds up slowly over hours or days. You check back to see what someone added while you were away. That checking-back feeling is the whole point.
It's built on Cloudflare's stack ... Pages, Workers, D1, R2 ... which made it practical to keep running costs near zero even if image traffic picks up. Anonymous contributions are supported, so people can add to a quilt without signing in. There's a creator moderation flow for removing individual squares. It's a full thing, not a prototype.
You can try it at getpatchwork.us. Create a quilt, share the link, see what happens. I'm curious whether the async cadence translates, whether the slow-accumulation feeling survives outside a restaurant booth.
(The drawing canvas is still on the todo-list)