Guides / Making your chart
Too small and a chart loses its subject; too big and it never gets finished. The right width comes from three questions, asked in order.
The width of a chart, counted in stitches, decides three things at once: how much detail it holds, how big the finished piece is, and how many evenings it will take. Choose it in that order. First what the subject needs to be recognisable, then how much wall it will cover, and last how much time you want to give it.
A chart 60 stitches wide is a picture 60 pixels wide. That is very little: the icon of an app on your phone has more. Anything smaller than a stitch disappears, and an eye that fits in two stitches no longer has a look in it.
So before choosing a width, look at your subject and ask what its smallest essential detail is. A heart has none: 25 stitches will do. For a cat it is the eyes and the nose. For a face it is the distance between the eyes and the shape of the mouth, which is why portraits need so many stitches.
These guidelines come from what people actually stitch, here and on stitching forums. They are for the width; the height follows the proportions of the picture.
| Subject | Suggested width | On 14-count aida |
|---|---|---|
| Letter, heart, small motif | 25 to 40 stitches | 4.5 to 7.3 cm |
| Single flower, animal silhouette | 40 to 60 stitches | 7.3 to 10.9 cm |
| Animal with its face and eyes | 70 to 100 stitches | 12.7 to 18.1 cm |
| Detailed pet portrait | 100 to 150 stitches | 18.1 to 27.2 cm |
| Human face | 120 stitches and up | 21.8 cm and up |
Tip. For a first piece, stay under 60 stitches wide. A piece that keeps moving gets finished; a 150-stitch piece started in the first week often ends up in a drawer.
You can also take the question the other way round: you have a frame and want to fill it. Multiply the width you want in centimetres by 5.5 on 14-count aida: a 20 cm opening takes 110 stitches. Take a few off if the design should breathe under a mount.
The fabric calculator does this sum both ways, for every fabric, and tells you how much to cut. The guide to fabric and size explains why an 80-stitch chart is 14.5 cm wide on 14-count aida and 11.3 cm on 18-count: the fabric changes the size, never the detail.
At an unhurried pace you stitch about 350 stitches an hour, thread changes included. A filled square 50 stitches a side is 2,500 stitches, roughly 7 hours. At 100 a side it becomes 10,000 stitches and 29 hours, about 15 two-hour evenings. At 150 it is 22,500 stitches and around 65 hours.
Time grows with the area, not the width: double the width and you quadruple the work. A chart with no background, where only the subject is stitched, goes much faster than these figures. The converter shows the exact number of stitches under the chart, so you can compare two widths before you choose.
A small chart cannot show many shades: on 40 stitches, fifteen threads end up as single stitches, one square each. The smaller the chart, the fewer colours it wants. Count 5 to 8 threads under 50 stitches, 10 to 15 between 60 and 100, and more only beyond that.
The guide to reducing the number of colours shows how to find the right number without losing what matters, and the one on choosing your DMC colours helps you build a palette that holds together.
In the converter, the “Stitches wide” slider runs from 20 to 200. Try your photo at two or three widths: the chart redraws at once, with its size and its total number of stitches. Stop at the smallest width where the subject is still recognisable; it is nearly always the best one.
The rest of the settings, step by step, are in the guide to turning a photo into a chart. If the picture is not ready yet, prepare it first: a tight crop is worth twenty extra stitches of width.
A ready-made chart already has its width in stitches, shown with its thread list. What is left to choose is the fabric, and so the finished size. The animals and landscapes in the gallery are often larger than the motifs, which stitch up in a few evenings: a good place to start if you are new to it.