How to turn a photo into a cross stitch pattern

Six steps, about 15 minutes, free. You can follow along in the photo to pattern converter in another tab.

1. Choose the photo

Pick a sharp photo with one subject, even light and a plain background. Pets looking at the camera, house fronts and couples against the sky work best.

2. Crop it

Crop so the subject fills most of the frame. Everything you leave in becomes stitches, and busy backgrounds become confetti.

3. Set the size

Choose the width in stitches: 100–150 for faces and pets, 70–120 for houses, 40–70 for cards. On 14-count, 100 stitches are about 7.1 inches.

4. Choose the number of colors

Start with up to 30 DMC colors. Fewer colors are calmer to stitch and cost less floss; more look closer to the photo.

5. Clean up confetti

Check the share of single stitches with no same-colour neighbour. Under 5% is easy, over 12% is hard. Lower the colors, crop closer or use clean-up.

6. Print and buy floss

Download the PDF on A4 or US Letter, tape the pages together using the 2 repeated rows, and buy the skeins from the floss key.

What our tests showed

We converted 15 real photos (pets, portraits, landscapes, houses, weddings; all public-domain images) at 100 stitches wide and up to 30 colors. With no clean-up, 2.6%–10.5% of stitches were confetti. Basic clean-up, which is free, brought that to 0.1%–2.5%. The strongest Pro clean-up brought it to 0.0%–0.2%. Fine texture (roses, a stone cottage, a lace bouquet) gave the most confetti; plain backgrounds the least.

Against other tools on the same photos, see the side-by-side table on the home page.

Checking the skeins

The floss key rounds each color up to whole 8-metre skeins for 2 strands; the formula is on the cross stitch calculator page. Picking a tool first? See the comparison of pattern makers.