Cross Stitch Pattern Maker

A cross-stitch pattern is a grid in which every square is one stitch and every symbol is one colour of embroidery floss. This maker turns a photo or drawing into that grid: it shrinks the picture to the number of stitches you choose, reduces it to a limited set of colours, and matches each colour to the nearest DMC stranded cotton. You get a colour preview, a symbol chart with bold lines every ten stitches, a floss list with stitch counts and skein estimates, and a printable PDF split across pages.

How to use this tool

1. Choose a picture with clear shapes; crop it to the subject first.
2. Set the width in stitches and your fabric count to see the finished size.
3. Choose the maximum number of colours (8–20 suits most designs) and whether to dither.
4. Optionally leave white areas unstitched so the fabric shows through.
5. Download the chart, the preview and the PDF, then buy the listed DMC floss.

Formula

finished size = stitches ÷ fabric count (inches) · skeins = stitches × (2√2 + 2) × (25.4 ÷ count) mm × 1.2 ÷ (8,000 mm × 6 ÷ strands)

Colours are chosen with k-means clustering in CIELAB space, then each cluster is replaced by the DMC floss with the smallest colour difference (ΔE*76). Every stitch then takes the nearest of those flosses; dithering spreads each stitch's rounding error to its neighbours (Floyd–Steinberg). The thread estimate counts two diagonals on the front and about two stitch-lengths on the back per cross, plus 20% for starts and ends; a skein holds 8 m of six strands.

Example

An 80 × 60 stitch pattern on 14-count Aida is 80 ÷ 14 = 5.7 in (14.5 cm) wide and 60 ÷ 14 = 4.3 in (10.9 cm) tall. Each cross uses about (2.83 + 2) × 1.81 mm × 1.2 ≈ 10.5 mm of two-strand thread, so one skein covers about 2,280 stitches: a colour with 1,500 stitches needs 0.66 of a skein, so buy one.