How to · 3 min read · updated 2026-10-23

How to make a tapestry from your group chat

The Bayeux Tapestry is nearly 70 metres of people arguing, falling off horses and pointing at a comet. Your group chat has the same energy.

What to paste

Copy the part of the chat where it all went wrong, plus a bit either side for context. Group Chat Tapestry reads up to about 6,000 characters, which is a long evening of messages but not a year of them. A WhatsApp export works, including the ones where senders show up as phone numbers.

It looks for the single most chaotic moment, gives it a chaos score out of 100, and shows you the runners-up in case it picked the wrong fight. The moment it picks gets a title like a museum placard: The Burning of Dave's Gazebo.

What gets scrubbed before the AI sees it

Before the AI sees the chat, the site strips out phone numbers, emails, links and website names, @handles, card numbers, street addresses and postcodes, and turns full names in speaker labels ("Dana Whitfield:") into first names. It tells you how many things it scrubbed. The chat is read once and never stored or logged, and real names never reach the image.

One thing it can't catch: a surname typed inside a message. If someone wrote their own full name mid-argument, trim that line out first.

What actually prints

All the text is editable. The Latin accepts capitals, digits and light punctuation only, and anything else gets folded to fit, so accents come off and long dashes become dots.

• The scene, stitched-looking figures in the Bayeux style, with no text in the picture itself.
• A Latin band in capitals, with the little raised dot (·) the original uses between phrases. Something like HIC DAVID GAZEBO INCENDIT.
• An English translation underneath, if you want it.
• The placard: title, year and chaos score.

It looks stitched, but it's printed

Worth knowing before you hang it: the stitches are part of the picture. The design is printed onto the fabric at 150 DPI (the wall tapestry and the fleece throw both use sublimation, where the ink goes into the fibres), so it's flat and soft rather than raised.

The same chat, other ways

Two other sites start from a pasted chat too, and scrub it the same way.

• The Illuminated Manuscript: the moment written out by a monk, with a strip of margin doodles at the bottom. The scribe drafts it three ways (Latin, Olde English and plain English) and you pick the one that prints. Poster or canvas.
• The Frieze: the incident painted as black figures on a Greek vase, with everyone's names in Greek letters. On a mug, a tumbler, a tee or wrapping paper.

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