Image to knitting pattern

How to turn a photo into a knitting chart

1. Open the photo. Crop close first; a face, a pet, a house or a logo on a plain background charts far better than a busy scene. The Crop Image tool does that without uploading anything.
2. Knit a swatch and type your gauge. Count stitches and rows in 10 cm (or 4 in) of stocking stitch, after washing it, and type both with the width you want. Or set the grid size in stitches.
3. Pick the technique: stranded (Fair Isle) for small repeating colour changes, intarsia for big separate blocks of colour, duplicate stitch to embroider the picture onto plain knitting afterwards. Then flat or in the round.
4. Choose 2 to 8 colours. Stranded works best with 2 per row. Tap a swatch to set the yarn you own; raise “merge runs” to remove lone stitches.
5. Fix or draw stitches. Choose Paint, pick a colour and tap or drag on the chart; Fill recolours one joined patch; Mirror copies each stitch to the other half; add or remove rows and columns at any edge. Undo goes back 100 steps. Or skip the photo and start a blank chart.
6. Knit from the written rows. Tap the row you are on; the chart lights it and the page remembers it next time on this device. Download the PDF to knit from paper.

Gauge decides the shape

Charts on square graph paper assume a square stitch, but a knit stitch is wider than it is tall. Stitch width = 10 cm ÷ stitches per 10 cm; row height = 10 cm ÷ rows per 10 cm. At 22 stitches and 30 rows per 10 cm a stitch is 4.5 mm wide and 3.3 mm tall, so a cell's height is 22 ÷ 30 = 0.73 of its width. A 40 × 40 square-cell chart knitted at that gauge comes out 18.2 cm wide and only 13.3 cm tall. This page draws every cell at 0.73 : 1 and, for a square photo, charts 40 stitches by 55 rows, so the piece is 18.2 × 18.3 cm and the photo is not squashed.

Stranded: floats and colours per row

In stranded (Fair Isle) knitting the colour you are not using travels across the back of the work as a float. In this page's count a float is the stitches between two stitches of the same colour in one row; in the round the gap across the start of the round counts too, because the yarn goes all the way round. A common guide is to carry a colour across up to 5 stitches and catch it behind the work on anything longer (the Left Stranded hat pattern: “stranding across up to five stitches at a time and catching floats longer than that”). It is a guide, not a law: knitters at Modern Daily Knitting put it at 5 for worsted and 7 for fingering or sticky Shetland wool, and 4–5 for slippery superwash. So the limit is yours to set. Floats longer than it are drawn in red on the chart and listed with their row, colour and length. Rows that use more than two colours are flagged too: most knitters hold two colours at once, and a third makes the fabric thicker and the floats harder to keep even.

Intarsia: bobbins

Intarsia does not carry yarn across the back; every block of colour has its own length of yarn, usually wound on a bobbin. The rule this page counts by: one bobbin for every separate area of a colour in a row. A row that reads 4 A, 5 B, 6 A needs 3 bobbins, two of A and one of B. For each colour the page gives the most separate areas it has in any one row, and the row that needs the most bobbins at once. It is a rough count of what to wind: an area that splits in two partway up needs a new bobbin from that row.

Drawing your own knitting chart

Type the stitches and rows, your gauge, and flat or in the round, then press Start blank: you get two colours (a cream ground and a navy motif, recolour them to your yarn) on a grid drawn at the stitch's real shape. A 30 × 30 chart at 22 stitches and 30 rows per 10 cm knits to 13.6 × 10 cm, not a square. Paint changes the stitches you tap or drag across; Fill changes one joined patch of a colour (stitches touching side by side, not corner to corner); Mirror copies every stitch to the same row on the other side of the dashed centre line, so a 12-stitch motif painted at stitch 2 also gets stitch 11. + Colour adds a colour (up to 8), Remove gives its stitches the nearest remaining colour, and Recolour changes the yarn colour without moving a stitch. A new row or column takes the colour most stitches already have.

The checks run as you paint, not after: the line above the chart counts long floats and rows with more than 2 colours (stranded) or the bobbins the row you touched needs (intarsia), and red float bars appear on the chart mid-drag. Worked example, stranded with a limit of 5: on a 12-stitch row, colour B at stitches 1 and 9 leaves B carried behind stitches 2 to 8, a float of 7, flagged red. Add B at stitch 5 and the two floats are 3 and 3, and the flag goes. In intarsia a row reading A A B B A needs 3 bobbins: two of A, one of B. Every edit also rewrites the written rows, the yarn per colour, the row tracker and the PDF, PNG and CSV.

Once you have changed a photo chart, the gauge only changes the stated size, not the grid. Changing the photo settings (colours, merge runs or size) rebuilds the chart from the photo and replaces your edits; Undo brings them back.

Duplicate stitch

Duplicate stitch (Swiss darning) embroiders over finished knit stitches, one V at a time, so you can knit the piece in one colour and add the picture after. The most common colour is taken as the knitted background and drawn faded; every other cell is a stitch to embroider. Counts and yarn are given per colour.

Flat or in the round

• Flat: row 1 is the bottom row. Odd rows are right-side (RS) rows, read right to left; even rows are wrong-side (WS) rows, purled, read left to right. Written like Row 2 (WS, left to right): 4 A, 5 B, 6 A.
• In the round: every round is knitted from the right side, so every round reads right to left, starting at stitch 1 on the right.

Yarn per colour

Yarn = stitches of that colour × yarn per stitch, plus the spare percentage, rounded up to a whole metre and a whole yard. In stranded knitting each colour also travels behind the stitches it skips, so those carried stitches are added at one stitch width each. The yarn per stitch starts from a measured table (Elizabeth Smith Knits, “How much yarn do you need to make a swatch?”, fetched 2026-10-20): a 6 × 6 in stocking-stitch swatch took 32–36 yd in sport/DK (5–5.75 stitches per inch), 27–32 yd in worsted (4.25–5) and 21–26 yd in aran (3.25–4). That is about 13.4 cm of yarn per square centimetre of DK fabric. At 22 × 30 per 10 cm one stitch covers 0.152 cm², so the default is 2.03 cm per stitch; the figure follows your gauge until you type your own. Better still: unravel one row of your swatch, measure it, and divide by its stitches.

What it cannot do

• No lace, cables or texture stitches. Every cell is one stocking stitch of one colour; there are no symbols for yarn-overs, decreases, cables, purl texture or slipped-stitch (mosaic) patterns.
• No shaping. The chart is a rectangle. It does not follow a sweater, hat crown or sock heel; place it inside your own pattern's stitch count.
• Yarn amounts are an estimate. Tension, needles, fibre and how you weave in ends all move them. Raise the spare percentage and buy from one dye lot.
• Screen colours are not yarn colours. Match the swatches to real yarn in daylight, and tap a swatch to type the colour you own.
• Mirror is left to right only. There is no top-to-bottom mirror, rotation or copy-and-paste of a motif; paint a repeat by hand or with Fill.
• Undo lasts while the page is open. The chart itself is kept, but the 100-step undo history starts empty after a reload.
• Saved on this device only. The photo is kept in this browser's storage (IndexedDB) and the chart with your edits, the settings and row tracker in local storage, so they are not on your other devices. “Clear saved work” deletes all of it.

Questions

Is this image to knitting pattern converter free, and is my photo uploaded?

Free, with no sign-up. The photo is read by this page in your browser and never sent anywhere; you can switch off the network after the page loads and it still works.

How many stitches wide should my chart be?

Stitches = width × stitches per 10 cm ÷ 10. For a 40 cm cushion front at 22 stitches per 10 cm that is 88 stitches. Charts up to 200 × 200 are allowed; above about 60 stitches a photo starts to read clearly.

Can I make a knitting chart online free without a photo?

Yes. Under the photo box, type the stitches, rows and your gauge, choose flat or in the round and press Start blank. Paint the motif, turn on Mirror for a symmetric one, and watch the float count above the chart as you go; then download the PDF with the written rows.

Should I use stranded knitting or intarsia for a picture?

Look at the check under the chart. If stranded shows dozens of long floats or many rows with 3 or more colours, the picture has large blocks of colour: intarsia (worked flat) or duplicate stitch suits it better. If intarsia asks for 10 or more bobbins in a row, the picture is busy: stranded, fewer colours, or more merging suits it better.