Cross-stitch

Turn a photo into a cross-stitch pattern

A usable cross-stitch pattern is a small grid, a short list of floss numbers, and a symbol in every cell. A pixelated photo with 80 colors isn't a pattern yet. You would spend the evening sorting thread instead of stitching.

Open the cross-stitch converter. It starts at 40 cells wide, 12 colors, dithering off, and a floss palette. Twelve is a hobby count, not a museum count. You can move the slider. Every extra color is another symbol and another skein.

What the numbers mean

The palette is a published list of 454 floss colors (compiled by Sharla Gelfand, MIT license, see the site notices). The converter picks as many of those colors as your slider allows, choosing the ones nearest a median cut of the photo, then snaps every cell to that short list. The legend shows the floss id, the color name, the reference hex, and the stitch count.

These hex values are a reference, not a scan of the skein in your hand. Light in the room changes them. So does a phone camera. Before you buy ten skeins of a near-black, hold the card next to the swatch. DMC is a trademark of its owner. Pixelate Tools isn't affiliated, and the chart isn't a licensed pattern.

Pick a size you can finish

Width 40 on a portrait often becomes something like 40×50. That's 2,000 stitches if every cell is filled. On 14-count Aida, 14 stitches fit in one inch, so 40 stitches is 40/14 inches, about 2.9 inches. On 18-count, the same 40 stitches are about 2.2 inches. The tool doesn't know your fabric. You do this division.

If you want a 8-inch wide piece on 14-count, you need about 112 stitches across. The converter allows up to 128, but the symbol table on the page stops at 80 on a side so the browser stays usable. Above that, download the large PNG with the grid and count from the file, or lower the width. A first photo project is kinder at 40 to 60.

Prepare the photo so the chart is readable

Crop to the head and shoulders, or to the object. Raise contrast until the eyes are darker than the cheeks. Then look at 12 colors with dithering off. If the eyes vanished, go to 16 colors or increase width by 8. Don't turn dithering on to "save" the eyes. You'll get a checker of two symbols across the face. The dithering page explains why that looks fine on screen and bad in thread.

Backgrounds eat stitches. If the wall is half the chart, crop it. Empty cells stay empty in the table, which is what you want for a shaped ornament. "Drop the corner color" can clear a flat wall. Use it only after you see that the wall color isn't also the shirt.

Read the chart, then buy thread

The symbol table and the legend are the pattern. Print them. The letters aren't a code you've to memorize. A is the most common color, B the next, and so on. How to follow a row without losing your place is covered in how to read a symbol chart. Buy the counts in the legend, plus a little extra for mistakes. The legend count is filled cells of that symbol, which is the stitch count if you stitch every filled cell once.

Color count strategy lives in how many colors to use. For stitch work, believe the low end of that page. A chart you'll actually finish beats a chart that matches the photo from across the room and then sits in a bag.

When a photo shouldn't become a chart

Skip wide landscapes you'll never finish, unclear photo rights, or photoreal shading. Night shots with noise become confetti symbols unless you fix light in the crop first.

Shopping and stitching checklist

Worked stitch load: a 40×50 chart with no empties is 2,000 crosses. At twelve colors, the legend might show one color at 800 stitches for background and the rest under 300 each. That split tells you whether to crop again before you start. A background under 200 stitches is a sign the crop is doing its job.

Questions

Keep going

• Cross-stitch converter
• Read a symbol chart
• How many colors
• Why dithering fights charts

Updated 30 September 2026