Turn your photo into a cross stitch pattern

No. Your photo is read, cropped and turned into a pattern entirely inside your browser — it never leaves your device. When you buy the printable PDF, what we receive is the finished chart: the thread list and one number per stitch. There is no copy of your photograph on our servers to keep, lose or hand over.

A print-ready PDF: a full colour chart and a full symbol chart of the same pattern, bold lines every 10 stitches with numbered rows and columns, centre marks, a thread legend with DMC numbers and skein counts, and a tick-box shopping list sorted by DMC number. Big charts are split across pages with an overlap of at least 2 stitches and a page map, on US Letter or A4.

Yes, free. You pay once per photo. Once you have bought a pattern from a photo, you can come back in the same browser, change the width, the colours, the fabric count or the paper, and export again without paying again.

Because the preview is free and the pattern is what you are buying. The preview shows you what the finished piece will look like, at a size where you can see the colours but cannot count the squares — and it has no symbols, no numbered grid and no per-colour skein counts. Everything you need to actually stitch it is in the PDF.

Twenty to thirty is right for most photographs. Fewer gives a graphic, poster-like result and a short shopping list; more gives subtler skin tones and gradients, at the cost of more thread changes. Threads that turn out to be the same DMC colour are merged, so asking for 30 often gives 26 — which is correct: 26 threads is what you buy.

Almost certainly not. Dithering scatters single stitches of a contrasting thread to smooth out colour banding. On a screen it looks wonderful; on fabric, every one of those stitches is a thread change, a knot and a minute of your life, and the effect is invisible from across a room. It is there for the one case it helps — a large, smooth sky where the banding genuinely bothers you.

The PDF is built the way those apps expect a chart to be built: vector text rather than a scanned image, one unique symbol per colour, and a text legend listing every symbol against its DMC number. We can't promise a particular app will import it, though — none of them publish a format to build against, and none certify charts.