Create your pattern

How a photo becomes a chart

Your photo is read square by square, matched to real DMC thread colours, and drawn as a chart you can work from. Nothing is traced or redrawn by hand. The same engine runs on every photo, and what the preview shows is what the PDF prints.

What you get

• The chart, with a symbol in every square and the grid counted in tens.
• The symbol key, so any square can be read back to a thread number.
• The thread list, with how many skeins of each colour to buy.
• The finished size on the fabric you chose, before you cut anything.

Choosing the stitch count

The stitch count is the longest side of the chart, and it settles two things at once: how much of the photo survives, and how big the finished piece will be.

A hundred stitches on 14-count aida comes out at about 18 cm. The same hundred on 18-count comes out at 14 cm, and every stitch is smaller to make.

Faces need room. Starved of stitches, a face loses the things that make it that face, and no amount of colour brings them back — the page will tell you when the detail has gone. A flower, a landscape or a pet at a distance asks far less of the count.

Choosing the colours

More colours is not more detail. Past a point the extra threads go on differences too small to see in wool, and you pay for them twice: once at the shop, and again every time you change thread.

Start at the middle of the slider and watch the preview rather than the number. When adding colours stops changing what you see, you have enough.

Single stitches

A photo converted square by square leaves single stitches scattered through the chart — one lone colour with nothing of its kind beside it. They are faithful to the photograph and miserable to stitch: a needle threaded, one cross made, the thread finished off, for a square nobody will ever pick out.

Every one of them is merged into the colour around it before the chart reaches you. Pairs and runs are left alone, because two stitches can be a highlight and one cannot.

What makes a photo work

One subject, close, with the light behind you rather than behind it. Busy backgrounds spend colours on things you never wanted to stitch, so crop in before you start — or drag the frame, which is already sitting on the subject when the photo loads.

If the subject is small in the frame, or if it sits too close in colour to what is around it, the page will say so before you spend time on it.