How to turn a photo into a knitting or crochet chart

A pet, a flower, a logo or your favorite mug: almost any picture can become a colorwork chart. The trick is choosing the right photo and preparing the chart so it's actually pleasant to knit or crochet. Here's what to pay attention to.

1. Choose a picture that works as stitches

• Simple shapes and strong contrast work best. A clear silhouette reads well even at 40 stitches wide; fine detail disappears.
• A plain background keeps the chart clean. Busy backgrounds turn into scattered single stitches.
• Crop tightly around the subject, so every stitch goes to what matters.
• Avoid soft gradients such as skies or shadows. With only a few colors they become hard stripes or noise.

2. Size the chart to your gauge

Decide how wide the motif should be, then multiply by your stitches per centimeter. Example: a motif 20 cm wide at a gauge of 22 stitches per 10 cm needs 20 × 2.2 = 44 stitches. The more stitches, the more detail, and the more work.

3. Mind the shape of a stitch

This is the step most chart generators get wrong. Knitted stitches are wider than they are tall: at 22 stitches and 30 rows per 10 cm, a stitch is about 1.4 times as wide as it is high. Chart a square photo on square cells, knit it, and the motif comes out squashed and too short. A good chart uses more rows to make up for it, or cells in the true proportion of your gauge. Single crochet is closer to square, and cross-stitch is square.

4. Keep the colors few

• Stranded knitting (Fair Isle) usually uses two colors per row; the whole chart can have more, row by row.
• Intarsia handles larger areas of many colors, each worked with its own bobbin.
• Tapestry crochet carries the unused colors inside the stitches, so two or three per row are comfortable.
• Corner-to-corner (C2C) crochet and cross-stitch work like pixel art and can take more colors.

Start with as few colors as the picture allows, often four to six, and add more only if something important is lost.

5. Clean up the chart

Look for single stray stitches of one color in an area of another: they're fiddly to work and rarely add anything, so change them to their neighbors. In stranded knitting, watch for long floats: more than five to seven stitches of one color in a row means catching the float behind the work, or adjusting the chart.

Make the chart in YarnSpace

With Photo to Chart in YarnSpace you pick a photo, choose knitting, crochet or cross-stitch, the width in stitches and the number of colors, and get a chart right away. Its cells follow your gauge, so the motif comes out in the right proportions. You can work straight from the chart and check off stitches as you go, or start a project with it. Making charts is free; saving them and checking off stitches is part of YarnSpace Pro.

Turn your photo into a chart

YarnSpace is the knitting and crochet app for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch.

See what YarnSpace can do