# La Vallée des Points de Croix

> Upload a photograph and every stitch is matched to a real DMC thread, then handed back as a printable chart with the exact references and stitch counts. Free, no account, and the conversion runs entirely in the browser so the picture is never uploaded.

Turning a photograph into a cross-stitch chart means two reductions: the picture comes down to a grid where one square is one stitch, and every colour is then replaced by the nearest real DMC thread reference — what English-speaking stitchers call image to DMC cross stitch. It is not a pixel-art filter: every colour in the result has to exist as a numbered skein somebody can buy.

The site is also a gallery of what people made with it: charts anybody can take, photographs of finished work posted by the people who stitched it, and — under any chart somebody has stitched — the finished pieces that came out of that particular grid.

The conversion is not a service: it is JavaScript running on the visitor's own machine, so no photograph is uploaded to produce a chart. A visitor without an account sends nothing at all. A signed-in member's last ten charts are kept for six months, each with the reduced photograph that made it, so they can be picked up again — and can be deleted at any time. Publishing a finished piece sends the grid, a few kilobytes of thread indices, plus the photograph if the member adds one.

## Pages

- [Photo to cross-stitch chart converter](https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/convert): The tool itself. Choose the width in stitches and how many thread colours, turn the picture if it came off a phone sideways, lift the colour, or cut the background away with a segmentation model that runs locally. Swap any matched thread for another of the 483 plain-cotton DMC shades, then download a PNG with the counting grid and the thread list. A sheet per single colour is available too, for telling two near-identical shades apart.
- [DMC threads — the complete stranded-cotton colour chart](https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/threads): The whole DMC stranded-cotton range on one page, grouped by colour rather than by number — DMC numbers run in release order, so 150 is a bright red and 151 a pale pink — and each family sorted light to dark, across ten families from neutrals through to violets. Searchable by reference or by name in French or English. Opening a shade gives its reference, both names, its hex and RGB values, the published charts that already use it, and a link to a shop that stocks it. The speciality ranges (Metallic, Satin, Étoile, Neon) are excluded because they share their numbers with plain cotton.
- [One DMC thread, in full](https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/threads/dmc-{reference}): Every one of the 483 shades has a page of its own at this address, with the reference substituted — /threads/dmc-310 is black, /threads/dmc-blanc and /threads/dmc-b5200 are the two whites, /threads/dmc-ecru is ecru. Each gives the reference, the name in French and in English, the colour as hex and RGB, which of the eleven colour families it belongs to, the eight nearest shades by CIEDE2000 with how far apart they look — the answer to "what do I use instead of DMC 310" — and the charts published on this site that are stitched with it.
- [Cross-stitch fabric size calculator](https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/tools/fabric-size): Stitch count in, cloth out. Give a chart's width and height in stitches and a fabric count and it returns the finished motif, the piece to cut with 5 cm of margin on every side, the effective count when stitching over two threads, how many strands to separate, the number of squares in the grid, and how far one 8 m skein goes. Aida, evenweave and linen, over one thread or two, in centimetres or inches. The formula is stated on the page — size in centimetres is stitches ÷ (count ÷ 2.54) — with a worked example at 80 × 100 stitches, plus why the margin is five centimetres, how many strands each count wants, and the fact that 28-count linen worked over two threads is the same size as 14-count aida.
- [Colour to DMC thread — hex or RGB to a real reference](https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/tools/colour-to-dmc): Paste a hex value (#1B4D3E), an RGB triplet, or pick a colour, and get the nearest DMC stranded cottons ranked by CIEDE2000 — the difference an eye reports rather than the difference between the numbers, which is what makes two dark greens come out far apart and two pale pinks come out close. Each result gives the reference, both names, how far away it looks, and a link to that thread's own page. The page also explains how to read a ΔE (under 1 is indistinguishable, over 5 is another colour), where a colour worth matching should come from, and why a screen is not a skein.
- [Cross-stitch pattern maker — draw a chart by hand](https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/tools/pattern-maker): A grid editor for cross-stitch charts, in the browser. Every square is a stitch and every colour a real DMC stranded cotton, searchable by number or by name in French or English, or matched to any colour by CIEDE2000. Pencil, eraser, paint bucket, line, rectangle, circle, colour picker, left-right and top-bottom mirror symmetry, undo, zoom and pan, a thread picked out while the rest fade. Start from a blank grid up to 400 stitches a side, from a photo converted on this site (“Edit by hand”), or from a chart in the gallery whose author allows remixes (“Remix”). The chart is kept in the browser as it is drawn, downloads with its key and a sheet per thread, and can be published in the gallery, where a remix links back to the chart it came from.
- [Free cross-stitch calculators](https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/tools): The small tools, listed on one page: the fabric calculator and the colour matcher, which answer the sums a stitcher does before starting, and the pattern maker, for drawing a chart by hand. None needs an account and none sends anything anywhere — everything runs in the browser.
- [How to make a cross-stitch chart from a photo](https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/guide): What a cross-stitch chart made from an image actually is, and how to make one. The photograph is reduced to a grid where one square is one stitch, and every colour is then replaced by the nearest real DMC thread — image to DMC cross stitch, as opposed to a pixel-art filter, which is free to invent colours no shop sells. Then the whole process for someone who has never done it: which photographs survive being reduced to a grid, how to choose the width in stitches and the number of threads, a glossary of the six words that keep coming up (cross stitch, chart, DMC, aida, count, skein), how many stitches a skein covers, and how to stitch the result.
- [How to read a cross-stitch chart](https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/guide/reading-a-chart): What the squares, the symbols, the heavy counting lines and the centre arrows mean, why you start from the middle, how to read the legend as a shopping list, and how to count without losing your place. For someone holding their first chart.
- [Which photo makes a good cross-stitch chart](https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/guide/choosing-a-photo): Why the subject must fill the frame, why contrast matters more than sharpness, what to do about a busy background, and how animals, portraits, flowers and landscapes each behave when reduced to a grid. Includes the honest warning that faces are the hardest subject and need about 120 stitches to look like anybody.
- [Which fabric to choose, and how big the piece will be](https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/guide/fabric-and-size): What a fabric's count means, the one-line sum from stitches to centimetres, how much margin to leave, how many strands to use at each count, and how many skeins a chart needs — one skein of DMC stranded cotton covers about 1,500 stitches at two strands on 14-count.
- [Questions and answers about turning a photo into a cross-stitch chart](https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/faq): Twenty-three answers in five groups. What a chart made from a photograph is and what “image to DMC” means; how it differs from a pixel-art filter; how long a chart takes to stitch. Then what happens to your photograph (the conversion runs on your own machine; without an account it never leaves it), how many colours to choose, what the settings do, what is in the downloaded file, whether you may sell what you stitch — and where to find inspiration, including how to see a chart already stitched by somebody else before starting it.
- [Cross-stitch pattern gallery — free charts to browse and take](https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/gallery): Charts made on this site and shared by the people who made them, browsable by subject and free to download with their DMC thread lists and stitch counts. A chart somebody has already stitched links to the finished pieces that came out of it, so a pattern can be seen on real fabric before it is started. An optional account is what lets you add your own.
- [Finished cross-stitch pieces, photographed by the people who stitched them](https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/gallery/stitched): Photographs of finished cross-stitch, posted by the people who stitched it — the place to look for inspiration, and for what a chart really becomes in thread. A piece here needs no chart from this site; plenty were stitched from patterns found elsewhere, so it is a record of real work rather than a catalogue of what the converter can make.
- [Charts by subject](https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/gallery/{subject}): the gallery narrowed to one subject, with a short guide to stitching it and the DMC threads it tends to use. Subjects: pets, flowers, landscapes, motifs, halloween, christmas (for example https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/gallery/christmas). A subject with no creation yet is marked noindex.
- [About us](https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/about): Who makes it, where it came from, and why it is free and browser-only.
- [Contact and legal notice](https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/legal): Who publishes the site, where it is hosted, and how to reach a person about a bug, an idea or a request concerning stored data.
- [Site map](https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/site-map): Every page of the site on one page, under the footer's four headings: the converter and the tools, the two galleries, the DMC colour chart by family, the guide and its articles, and the pages about the site. Built from the same registries as this file, so a new page appears in it on its own.

## About

- Free to use: no account to convert, no watermark, nothing to buy.
- A gallery of charts to take and of finished pieces to look at, with each stitched chart linking to the work made from it.
- Private by construction — the tool has no upload path for a photograph.
- Matches against 483 plain-cotton DMC shades, chosen by CIEDE2000 rather than by nearest RGB. Metallic, satin and Étoile ranges are excluded because they share colour codes with plain cotton.
- The downloaded chart names real references with a stitch count for each, so it can be taken to a shop.
- Two languages, one page each: French at the addresses above, English at the same address under /en — /threads and /en/threads are the same page. Both are listed individually in the sitemap, and every page declares the pair as hreflang alternates.
- Published by Felar, an individual, and hosted by OVH SAS in Roubaix, France. Contact and the full legal notice are on /legal.

## Optional

- [Everything in one file](https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/llms-full.txt): the full description.
- [Official information for AI assistants](https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/llm-info): what the site is and is not, its main pages and how to cite it, as a page in French and English (https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/en/llm-info) and as raw Markdown (https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/llm-info.md).
- [Sitemap](https://vallee-points-de-croix.fr/sitemap.xml): every indexable route in both languages, including all 483 thread pages one by one, plus every published chart and member — it is built per request from the live table, so it is the only exhaustive list of this site that cannot go stale.