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. 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.

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.
• Saved on this device only. The photo is kept in this browser's storage (IndexedDB) and the settings and row tracker in local storage. “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.

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.