Turn any photo into a cross stitch pattern

Choose a photo that will survive being simplified

A cross stitch chart is a photo reduced to a few dozen colours and a few thousand squares, so the best source images are the ones that still read at that level: one clear subject, strong contrast between it and the background, and even lighting. A pet against a plain wall converts beautifully; a group photo at dusk does not.

Crop tightly before you convert. Every stitch spent on background is a stitch not spent on the face you care about.

Pick the size in stitches, not in centimetres

The chart has no physical size until you choose a fabric. The same 100-stitch-wide design is about 23 cm across on 11-count Aida and 14 cm on 18-count — the table below shows the common counts. Decide how big you want the finished piece, pick your fabric, and work backwards to the stitch count.

More stitches give more detail but take longer: a 150 × 150 chart is 22,500 stitches. For a first project from a photo, 60 to 100 stitches wide is a comfortable range.

Fewer colours usually looks better

Photos contain thousands of tones, and asking for too many floss colours produces 'confetti' — isolated single stitches of a colour that appears nowhere nearby. They are tedious to stitch and invisible from a metre away. Start with 12 to 20 colours, then merge any two that are hard to tell apart on screen.

After converting, zoom in on the face or main subject and hand-edit it. Eyes, in particular, are worth fixing stitch by stitch: a single misplaced highlight changes the expression.

Choosing floss

The PDF legend names the nearest DMC thread for every colour in your palette, so you can take it to a shop as a shopping list. Screens and floss never match perfectly — hold the actual skeins together before you commit, especially for skin tones.