How to Make a Cross Stitch Pattern From Any Photo

Turning a photo into a chart is easy. Turning it into a chart you will actually finish is the skill. This guide walks through the whole process in FlossPixel, and at each step explains the decision that separates a good chart from a frustrating one.

1. Pick the right photo

Everything downstream depends on this. You want one clear subject, even light and a quiet background. A pet on a plain blanket, a face by a window, a single flower against sky. If the photo has a busy background or soft gradients, it is still usable — but plan on an AI redraw first rather than a direct conversion.

Crop before you convert. At 100 stitches wide, a tightly cropped face gets 40–50 stitches of detail; the same face in a full-body shot gets 10. Resolution barely matters — a sharp 800-pixel image beats a blurry 4,000-pixel one.

2. Choose a stitch width

Stitch width sets everything: detail, finished size and hours. As a rule of thumb on 14-count Aida:

• 40–60 stitches — ornaments, bookmarks, keyrings. One evening.
• 80–120 stitches — a recognisable pet or face. A weekend or two.
• 150–200 stitches — portraits with real detail. A month of evenings.

Start smaller than you think. You can always regenerate; you cannot un-stitch.

3. Cap the colours

A photo has millions of colours. A chart should have 20–35. FlossPixel's colour limit forces the converter to cluster similar shades before matching them to floss, which is what keeps a ginger cat from needing eleven oranges. Our floss budget guide covers how to choose the number.

4. Kill the confetti

Drag the smoothing slider until isolated single stitches disappear from the preview. Watch the confetti count in the panel — under one per hundred stitches is comfortable. The confetti article explains why these stitches are so costly.

5. Check the size

The panel shows finished size on 11, 14, 16 and 18-count Aida. If it is too big, drop the stitch width or move to a finer count; if too small, do the opposite. The fabric maths guide has a calculator.

6. Export and print

Download the paged PDF. Print at 100% scale (not "fit to page") so the grid stays consistent across sheets, tape the pages along the overlap guides, and start from the centre mark outward. You are stitching.