Cross stitch pattern maker for your own photo

Confetti is a stitch with no neighbor of its own shade above, below or beside it, and this page counts them for you — watch the percentage, not the total. Each one is a thread started, one cross worked, the thread ended and the tail buried, so a hundred of them cost more evenings than a thousand stitches worked as a run. Under about one stitch in eight is comfortable going. Above that the chart is mostly thread management, and the three things that actually reduce it are raising the merge threshold, turning shade blending off, and cropping to a subject with less texture. Making the chart wider does not help: more squares means more places for a lone shade to land.

Because a skein is the smallest thing a shop will sell, so a shade needed eleven times costs exactly what a shade needed nine hundred times costs. That is why the merge control exists and why it defaults to on: it is a price control rather than a quality one. Since the match runs independently on every square, an unmerged chart of a photograph comes back with a long tail of shades wanted a handful of times apiece. Every one of those is still a whole skein, a thread change and a tail to bury. Raise the threshold and the page states exactly what went: how many shades, how many stitches moved onto their neighbors, and how many skeins that took off the list.

No — every square here is one full cross and nothing else. Backstitch is an outline a designer draws on top of a chart to put an edge back where whole crosses lose it, and there is no honest way to derive it from a photograph: the tool would have to decide which edges in the picture are the ones you meant. Fractional stitches (a quarter and a three-quarter sharing a square) and French knots are the same problem. If you want outlines, work the chart first and add backstitch by eye where the piece asks for it; a photograph charted in whole crosses is a legitimate finished object, and pretending otherwise is how converters end up shipping charts full of unstitchable half-squares.

You do not, and the cheapest way to skip it is to make the background transparent before the file comes in. A square that reads as more than half transparent is left as bare cloth here rather than filled with white, so it carries no stitch and appears in none of the counts or skein figures — the difference on a 100 by 125 chart with a cut-out subject is routinely four thousand crosses. Save the cropped subject as a PNG with an alpha channel from whatever you already use and drop that. If the background stays, it is worth knowing that a blurred one costs more shades than a sharp one, because gradual tonal drift is exactly what a fixed palette breaks into bands.

Not exactly, and this page prints how far off it might be for each shade. The number and the name come from DMC and are exact; the color does not come from DMC at all, because the company has never issued sRGB for its threads. What sits behind a swatch here is one reading of a physical card, and a second independent reading of the same 454 shades lands on identical bytes for a single one of them — 310, black. Thirty more come within 8 of 255, the middle of the distribution is 25 apart, and the extreme is 155 on 505 Jade Green. Any shade at 40 or worse prints that number in amber next to it, and those are the ones worth deciding with a card in your hand.

Yes, but convert the key rather than expecting a like-for-like swap. Anchor and DMC are different manufacturers dyeing different cotton, so a conversion table gives you the nearest thread somebody else judged acceptable, not the same color: the published mapping is many-to-one, with 464 Anchor numbers landing on 360 DMC codes, and it does not round-trip. Take the CSV this page gives you, convert the numbers, and check the substitutions in the shades that matter — the ones carrying most of the stitches and the ones in a face. A photo chart is more forgiving than a designed one here, because it has no flat blocks of a single shade for a bad substitute to sit in.

The middle, and the chart is ruled to make that easy: a heavy line falls every ten squares and the edges are numbered, so the center of a 100 by 125 chart is column 50, row 63 and you can count to it from a rule rather than from the margin. Starting in the middle is what keeps the design centered on cloth you cut generously, since a counting error near a corner pushes the whole piece off the fabric and you find out at the end. Fold the cloth in quarters, crease it, and put the first cross where the creases meet. If the chart printed as more than one sheet, the two columns and rows repeated at each join are there so you can carry a row across the page break without recounting.