Photo2PatternFree knitting chart generator
A knitting chart with the floats counted
Drop a picture and this charts it for knitted colorwork. It costs nothing and there is no account to make. Row 1 is the bottom line and odd rows read right to left, the way a chart is worked rather than the way an image is drawn, and the row count comes from your own gauge because a knit stitch is only about four-fifths as tall as it is wide. Then it measures the back of the fabric: the longest float in every row, how many of them exceed the limit you set, and how many rows ask for more than the two yarns stranded knitting can carry.
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- 20 to 240 stitches
- Floats measured per row
- Row 1 at the bottom
Press Ctrl+V anywhere on the page to drop in a design you copied rather than saved — no need to click the field first.
20 to 240. This is the motif, not the garment: a chart normally sits inside a piece cast on wider than it.
Converted at 18 stitches to four inches and rounded to a whole stitch, so the width lands within 0.11 in of what you type.
2 to 8 in the whole chart, named MC and CC1 upwards. Stranded knitting allows more than two overall as long as no single row uses more than two — the audit below counts the rows that do.
The council files 16–20 stockinette stitches to four inches here, on needles of 4.5–5.5 mm (US 7 to 9). Colorwork is usually a needle size up from that.
Off a blocked swatch worked in the technique above, not off the ball band.
The figure that decides the chart’s height. Ratio now 1.22 rows to the stitch — above 1.00 the stitch is wider than it is tall, which is normal.
Stitches. Five is the usual ceiling for a garment; three for mittens, socks and anything a child will put fingers through. A convention, not a standard.
Every cell takes its own nearest color. Flat areas stay flat and the color count stays low — the right choice for anything worked by hand.
How to chart a picture so it can actually be knitted
The technique first, then the swatch, then the one number that says whether to start at all.
Say how the color is carried before you size anything
Stranded means both yarns travel the whole row and the one not being knitted lies across the back as a float, which caps a row at two colors. Intarsia means a separate bobbin hanging off every block of color, which lifts the color cap entirely and replaces it with a block count and two ends to weave in per block. The choice also changes the gauge the page prefills, because stranded fabric is two yarns thick and knits squarer than plain stockinette: 18 stitches and 22 rows to four inches for stranded, 18 and 24 for intarsia.
Put in a swatch worked in the technique you just chose
Only half of this can be filled in for you. Choosing a weight brings across the council's stitch figure; there is no row figure to bring, because that table has never had a row column. So knit the swatch in the technique you just chose — two colors if you are stranding, since a carried yarn tightens a fabric that a single strand leaves alone — block it, and read both directions off it. Rows over stitches is the multiplier the chart applies to its own square grid, which makes the vertical reading the one that decides whether a motif lands as a circle or an egg.
Read the float column before the yarn is wound
Under the chart is a row-by-row table with the longest float in each row and the number of catches it needs at your limit. That number, not the picture, is what says whether this is knittable: a silhouette gives runs of twenty stitches that have to be trapped four times each, a photograph gives thousands of one-stitch runs and no float problem at all but a chart nobody can read. Move the stitch count, drop to two yarns or change the picture, and watch the longest float and the crowded-row count move before you commit.
Technical specifications
| Stitches in the chart | 20 to 240 across. At 18 stitches to four inches, 240 finishes 53.3 in wide. This is the motif, not the cast-on: a chart normally sits inside a piece wider than it |
|---|---|
| How the row count is derived | The vertical count is the square-grid one scaled by row gauge over stitch gauge. At the prefilled 18 and 22 that is 1.22, so a square picture asked for at 100 stitches comes back 122 rows tall rather than 100 |
| Techniques and the color rule | 2. Stranded carries two yarns a row and can be worked flat or in the round; intarsia takes any number of yarns but only flat, and is costed in blocks of color rather than in floats. Rows asking for more than two yarns are counted and named, not quietly allowed |
| Float ceiling | Editable, prefilled at 5 stitches — 3 for mittens and children's garments. Catches are ceil(float ÷ limit) − 1, so an 11-stitch float at a limit of 5 needs 2. Both figures are workshop convention; no standards body publishes either |
| Gauge the page starts from | 18 stitches and 22 rows to four inches for stranded, 18 and 24 for intarsia. Only the stitch figure has a standard behind it — the midpoint of the council's 16–20 band for a medium (4) yarn. The row figure is a swatch reading, because no published table anywhere gives a row gauge per weight; if it did, this field would not exist |
| Numbering on the chart | Row 1 is the bottom line and stitch 1 is at the right-hand end. Odd row numbers sit on the right edge and even on the left, matching the direction each is read; worked in the round every line is right-side and every number moves to the right |
| What one printed sheet holds | 40 stitches by 60 rows a sheet at 16 px a cell — 169 × 254 mm, inside A4's 190 × 277 mm — with two stitches and two rows of each neighbor repeated at the join, and a mark in every cell so a black-and-white printer still gives a usable chart |
| Requests carrying the picture | Zero. The file is decoded, reduced to yarns, charted and audited inside this tab; the row-by-row text and the CSV are built from the chart in memory and handed straight to the browser |
Frequently asked questions
Which corner of the chart does the first stitch sit in?
The bottom right. A knitting chart is worked from the cast-on upwards, so row 1 is the bottom line of the grid and its first stitch is the one at the right-hand end; row 2 sits above it, not below. That is also why the row numbers on this page alternate edges — odd rows are right-side rows read right to left and carry their number on the right, even rows are purled back left to right and carry theirs on the left, which is the printed convention and a running reminder of which way you are traveling. Charts exported from a paint program are numbered from the top left instead, which is how a motif ends up knitted upside down and mirrored at the same time.
How long can a float be before it has to be caught?
About five stitches on a garment, and three on anything a finger can go into — mittens, socks, a child's cuff — because a long strand across the back is what catches on a ring and pulls a whole row loose. Neither figure is a standard; both are workshop convention, which is why the limit here is a field rather than a constant. The catch arithmetic is ceil(float ÷ limit) − 1, so an eleven-stitch float at a limit of five needs two traps and comes out as three spans of four, not one trap in the middle. Trapping is not free either: where the two yarns differ sharply in value the caught strand shows on the front as a faint speckle, so a motif redrawn to shorten its runs beats a motif trapped every fifth stitch.
Can one row hold three colors?
Not stranded, no — two is the ceiling and it is a property of the technique rather than a rule someone made up. A third strand across the back triples the thickness, and keeping three tensions even across a row is beyond most hands, which is why traditional Fair Isle uses dozens of colors in a garment and exactly two in any given row, swapping the pair every few rows. This page counts the rows that ask for more than two and names the worst one, because a generator that hands back a five-color row has produced a picture rather than a pattern. The honest ways out are all here: bring the whole chart down to two yarns, band it so each stretch of rows uses a different pair, switch to intarsia, or knit the row plain and add the third color afterwards in duplicate stitch.
Why does a chart drawn on square graph paper knit up short and wide?
Because a knit stitch is not square — it is roughly four-fifths as tall as it is wide, so a grid of squares finishes as a grid of squat rectangles. At the 18 stitches and 22 rows to four inches this page starts from, a stitch is 0.222 in across and a row is 0.182 in high, so a 100 by 100 chart comes out 22.2 in wide and 18.2 in tall: eighteen percent shorter than it was drawn. The fix is to add rows rather than to redraw anything, multiplying the square-grid row count by rows-per-inch over stitches-per-inch, which at that gauge is 1.22. It is the reason knitter's graph paper is sold with oblong cells and the reason a heart charted on ordinary squares comes out looking like a pumpkin.
Will a photograph of a face work as colorwork?
Almost never, and the numbers on this page say so before the yarn is bought. Two yarns can only produce a hard edge, so a face reduces to a two-tone silhouette in which the shading that made it recognizable is gone; push it to five or six yarns and the per-row count stops being knittable at all. Intarsia can hold the colors, but a soft-edged photograph fragments into thousands of separate blocks of color, and the page counts them: each block is a bobbin to wind and two ends to weave in. What does work is anything with flat regions and a clean outline — a monogram, a pet in profile against a plain wall, a sprite, a snowflake, a band of geometry — which is the same shape of subject Fair Isle has been using for two centuries.
Do I read the chart differently when it is knitted in the round?
Yes, and it gets simpler: every round is a right-side round, so every line reads right to left and there are no purled return rows to reverse. All the row numbers move to the right edge to say so. The float measurements change too, because a round has no ends — the run at each edge of the chart is spanned by the yarn coming round to meet itself, so the same picture reports longer floats in the round than flat. That closing is also where the jog lives, since the last stitch of a round sits one row below the first, and it is why colorwork cardigans are knitted as a tube with a steek: knitting in the round to avoid purling in two colors, then cutting the tube open afterwards.
Does it matter which yarn I hold in which hand?
It matters more than almost anything else about the finish, and it has a name: yarn dominance. The strand carried below the other one travels slightly further round each stitch, makes a marginally larger stitch, and comes forward visually — so holding the motif color in the lower position makes the pattern stand out and holding it above lets the background win. Neither is wrong, but changing hands halfway up a chart is, because the motif visibly changes weight at the row where you swapped. Pick a position for the contrast yarn at row 1, write it on the printed chart, and keep it to the top.
About floats, and why two yarns a row is the whole rule
Every generator that turns a picture into a grid gets the easy half right and the hard half wrong, and for knitting the hard half is that the cell is not a square. A stitch is wider than it is tall — 0.222 in across against 0.182 in high at the 18 stitches and 22 rows to four inches this page starts from — so anything laid out on squares finishes squat, and a circle charted that way knits up as an ellipse. Graph paper printed for knitters carries rectangular cells for exactly that reason, and plain squared paper is the wrong sheet to plan colorwork on unless you already know your own ratio and have redrawn the motif for it. The correction inside this page is arithmetic rather than judgment: multiply the square-grid row count by rows-per-inch over stitches-per-inch. What it needs is a number the ball band does not carry. The Craft Yarn Council’s standard, where the stitch prefill on this page comes from, publishes a stitch gauge for all eight of its weight categories and a row gauge for none of them, so the vertical figure has to be counted off a blocked swatch — the gauge calculator turns one into both numbers, and the weight calculator will tell you which category the skein in your hand belongs to in the first place.
The second thing a knitting chart has to answer is not about the front of the fabric at all. In stranded colorwork the yarn you are not knitting with runs along the back, and that strand — the float — is what decides whether a picture is knittable. Two yarns is the ceiling for a row, not a preference: a third strand triples the thickness and asks you to hold three tensions even across a hundred stitches. Traditional Fair Isle uses dozens of colors in a sweater and exactly two in any one row, changing the pair every few rows, and that is the shape a chart has to fit. Length is the other half of the limit. Past about five stitches a float has to be caught, or it snags on a finger and pulls the row loose, and mittens and children’s garments are usually held to three. So this page counts both: the rows that ask for more than two yarns, named with the worst one, and every float in every row against a ceiling you set, with the catches each needs worked out as ceil(float ÷ limit) − 1. Most generators return a chart regardless and let the knitter discover the problem forty rows in.
The third thing is the direction, and it is the cheapest mistake to make. Knitting is worked from the cast-on upwards, so row 1 is the bottom line of the grid and the picture is read from the bottom right; images are stored from the top left, which is why a chart straight out of an image editor is upside down and mirrored at once. Flat knitting turns at the end of every row, so odd rows are right-side rows read right to left and even rows come back the other way — the numbers here sit on the edge each row is read from, which is the printed convention and a reminder you cannot ignore. Knitted in the round nothing turns, every round is a right-side round, and the floats close on themselves, so the same picture reports longer floats than it does flat. Intarsia escapes all of it by hanging a bobbin off every block of color, and pays for the escape in ends: this page counts the blocks, because a soft-edged photograph produces them in the thousands and two ends each. If the float count has pushed you toward a hook instead, the crochet graph charts the same picture for a fabric that cuts and rejoins rather than carrying, and the yarn calculator takes the stitch count from either of them and turns it into yardage you can spend money on.
What the browser does with your photograph
Your picture is opened by JavaScript running in the tab you are reading this in. It is never uploaded, never sent to a server and never stored anywhere — there is no upload step to undo, because there is no upload. Close the tab and nothing of it remains.