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Tapestry crochet charts that allow for the lean
This charts a motif for tapestry crochet worked in the round — a basket, a bag, a cowl — and deals with the thing that makes those different from a flat piece. Because the work never turns, every stitch leans the same way and a vertical line drawn on a square grid walks sideways as it climbs. Type the travel you measured on a swatch and the page will show you the lean, then hand back a chart with every round already turned back against it. It is free, needs no account, and gives you exact stitch counts for what shows and for what is carried hidden inside the fabric.
- 100% free
- No signup
- Skew corrected
- 2 to 4 strands
- Carried yarn counted
Press Ctrl+V anywhere on the page to drop in a motif copied straight out of a drawing app — no need to click the field first.
This is the circumference, so it fixes the size of the object: 72 stitches at 16 to four inches gives 18.0 in round and 5.7 in across the base.
A basket has a height you chose, so this is an input and not a consequence — 20.0 in as it stands.
Capped at 4, and the cap is the technique rather than the code: everything you are not working with is crocheted over, and three resting strands inside every stitch stop the fabric behaving like crochet.
Measure it: work eight rounds with one stitch of contrast stacked above itself, then count how far that column has walked. 0.25 is one stitch every four rounds.
Which way depends on the hand you hold the hook in and which way you go round. Work four rounds and look before you trust the default.
Tapestry crochet is worked tighter than the ball band suggests, because a loose stitch lets the carried strand show through as a speckle.
Worked in the round with no turning chain, so it does not match the row gauge from a flat swatch of the same yarn. Count it on a tube.
How to chart colorwork that is worked in the round
Size the tube, measure the lean, then work from the corrected grid.
Set the circumference, then the height
Stitches in a round is the size of the object, not a resolution: 72 stitches at 16 to four inches makes a tube 18.0 in round and 5.7 in across the base. Height is a separate field because a basket is as tall as you decided, not as tall as the artwork happens to be. The button beside it will size the tube from the artwork's own proportions instead, if that is the direction you are working in.
Measure the lean before you trust the chart
Work eight rounds in one color with a single contrast stitch stacked above itself, then look at where that column has got to. A quarter of a stitch a round is a common reading and it is what the field starts at, but it belongs to your hook, your yarn and your tension, and a left-handed crocheter going the other way round leans the other way. Type what you measured and set the direction to match.
Chart from the corrected grid, not the flat one
With the travel entered, switch between the three views. The picture as designed is the artwork on a grid; what a flat chart gives you is the leaning result that follows if the travel is ignored; the chart to work from has every round already turned back by its own share. Print that last one — each round is rotated, which a closed round permits because there are no ends for the shifted stitches to fall off.
Technical specifications
| Circumference | 30 to 200 stitches in the round. At the prefilled 16 stitches to four inches, 72 stitches makes a tube 18.0 in round and 5.7 in across the base — a basket, and the size most tapestry patterns are written for |
|---|---|
| Strands at once | 2 to 4. The ceiling is the technique: every color not on the hook is crocheted over, so a fourth strand is a fourth length of yarn running inside every stitch of the round |
| Round closures | 3: continuous spiral, slip-stitch joined, and joined-and-turned. Turning is the only one that cancels the lean, because the round worked back leans against the round below it |
| Travel prefill | 0.25 stitches a round — one stitch of sideways walk every four rounds — adjustable from 0 to 1 and reversible for a left-handed worker. It is measured off a swatch, not published: no standard covers it |
| Skew correction | Each round is rotated by its own accumulated travel, taken modulo the stitch count. Nothing is lost in the rotation because a round has no ends — the identical shift applied to a flat row would push stitches off the fabric |
| Counted exactly | Shown stitches and carried stitches for every strand, rounds whose two artwork edges disagree at the join, and stitches left isolated between two neighbors of another color |
| Printed and exported | 31 stitches by 46 rounds a sheet at 6 mm a cell, two stitches of overlap. PNG, strand CSV and the per-round travel list. No written line-by-line: a spiral has no row boundary to write a line about |
| Network use | Zero requests carry the artwork. It is decoded, reduced and charted inside this tab, and the travel figures are arithmetic on numbers you typed |
Frequently asked questions
Why does my design lean to one side as it goes up?
Because each stitch worked in the round sits slightly off the one below it and you never turn to cancel it out. In flat crochet the piece is turned every row, so a lean one way is followed by a lean the other and the two erase each other; in the round every stitch leans the same way, round after round, and the error accumulates. At a quarter of a stitch a round, a 90-round basket finishes 22 stitches out of true — nearly a third of the way round a 72-stitch tube — which is why a stripe of lettering charted straight comes out spiralling.
Which way do I read each round?
The same way every time, from the first stitch of the round to the last, because there is no turn. That is the one thing working in the round makes easier than working flat, and it is why tapestry patterns are given as charts rather than as written lines. It also means a mistake in reading direction cannot happen halfway up: if the first round came out right, every round after it reads the same.
What is the jog at the join, and can I get rid of it?
In a spiral the jog is structural and permanent: there is no round boundary at all, so the fabric is a helix and a horizontal stripe never meets its own beginning. Joining each round with a slip stitch removes the step, at the price of a column of joins running up one side that reads as a faint ridge — which is why bags built that way get the handle placed over it. Neither choice affects the lean; only turning does that, and turning brings its own ribbed surface.
How many colors can I actually carry?
Two comfortably, three at a push, four only in a stiff fabric you meant to be stiff. Tapestry crochet is defined by crocheting over the colors you are not using, so every extra strand is a strand running inside every stitch of the round. Three resting strands roughly doubles the thickness of the fabric and starts to show as lumps through a light main color. The cap on this page is four for that reason, not because of anything in the arithmetic.
Why does the carried color need so much yarn?
Because it is consumed on every stitch of every round it appears in, not only on the stitches where it shows. A contrast that shows on 300 stitches of a 72-stitch round over 40 rounds is also being carried through the other 2,580, and at a stitch-width apiece that is a meaningful length of yarn hidden inside the fabric. The table gives both numbers separately, because the shown count is what the design costs and the carried count is what the technique costs.
What happens where the two ends of the artwork meet?
They meet as neighbors, because the round closes — the last stitch of the round sits next to the first. The page counts how many rounds have different colors at those two positions, which is the number of rounds on which the join is visible as a hard edge. A motif designed to wrap wants that count near zero; a motif designed as a flat panel usually has it near the round count, and the honest answer there is to place the seam deliberately rather than to pretend it is not there.
Can I put a photograph on a bag this way?
Not usefully, and the fleck count says so with a number. Tapestry crochet resolves shapes with hard edges — lettering, geometry, a silhouette — because a color carried through a stitch cannot make a soft transition. The page counts stitches that stand alone with a different color on both sides; a photograph produces thousands of them, and each one is a fleck rather than a mark in yarn. If the picture is genuinely photographic, chart it flat as a graphgan instead, where you can cut and rejoin rather than carry.
About charting for a fabric that never turns
Tapestry crochet is single crochet worked over the colors you are not using, in continuous rounds, and both halves of that sentence create a problem a square chart cannot see. The rounds are the visible one. A stitch made in the round sits a fraction to the side of the stitch below it, and with no turn to reverse the bias that fraction accumulates: at a quarter of a stitch per round, ninety rounds carry the top of the design twenty-two stitches away from where it started. Charts that ignore it are the reason so many finished baskets have lettering that spirals. The fix is available here in a way it is not on flat work — each round can simply be rotated back by its own share of the accumulated travel, because a round is a closed loop and a stitch shifted off one end arrives at the other. Try the same shift on a flat row and you lose stitches at the edge, which is exactly why the graphgan and C2C page has no such control and does not need one.
The carried half is the invisible one. Because the resting strands run inside every stitch, a color costs yarn wherever it appears in a round rather than only where it shows — a contrast worked into a handful of stitches on forty rounds is being carried through thousands more. This page reports both counts separately and exactly, and the carried figure is usually the larger of the two. It is also the reason the strand list here is capped at four: each additional color is another length of yarn threaded through the whole circumference, and a fabric with three resting strands in it is noticeably thicker and starts to show as lumps under a pale main color. Working out what all that adds up to in skeins is the yardage calculator’s job, and if you are substituting a yarn for the one a pattern named, the weight comparison will tell you what that does to the gauge before you buy for a whole bag.
The last thing worth saying is what this technique will not do. Carried colorwork resolves hard edges: letters, geometry, a silhouette, a band of pattern. It cannot make a soft transition, because the strand under a stitch does not blend — so a single isolated stitch of contrast reads as a fleck rather than as a mark, and the page counts those for you precisely so the verdict is a number rather than an opinion. Notice too that the round closes, which means the two edges of your artwork become neighbors; a motif drawn as a flat panel almost always has a visible join, and the count of rounds where the two ends disagree is what tells you whether to redraw it or to place the seam somewhere it will not be looked at. Unlike a graphgan, where you usually choose the picture and then the yarn, tapestry crochet is typically the other way round — you own two or three cottons already, and the design has to live inside them. If you only want the picture reduced to a coarse grid of flat color with no material behind it, that is the pixelate page, and the same reduction rendered in glyphs rather than color is the ASCII art generator.
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Where the motif is read
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.
The travel figure, the gauge and the strand count are typed into this tab and stay in it. Nothing is stored between visits, so download the travel list along with the chart if you are going to be working from it over several evenings.