Counted cross stitch patterns

Counted cross stitch patterns, drawn here

Stitch Patterns sells modern counted cross stitch patterns as instant PDF downloads. The designs are made for this shop and charted here, and there is no lettering on any of them — the picture is the whole thing. There are 1543 to choose from, and they are added to constantly.

Charts are built for stitching, not for looking good in a listing photograph. Colours are matched to real DMC floss perceptually, so the darks stay distinct instead of collapsing into one another, and scattered single stitches are cleaned out of every chart before it ships — nobody wants to rethread a needle for one square.

New to cross stitch?

Every pattern in the shop is whole cross stitch only. No backstitch, no quarter or three-quarter stitches, no french knots. One X per square, start to finish — which makes any of them a reasonable first project. Every chart in the shop is 130 stitches square, which finishes at about 9¼ inches on 14-count aida, 8¼ on 16-count and 7¼ on 18-count. What varies is the number of colours — from eight to sixteen — and that is the real measure of how much work a chart is. If you have never worked from a counted chart before, the beginner’s guide walks through reading one, what to buy, and how to pick a first pattern you will actually finish.

What is in the PDF

The colour chart, the same chart again in black and white symbols so it prints legibly on any printer, a floss key naming DMC shade numbers with how many skeins of each to buy, and the finished size worked out for 14, 16 and 18-count aida. It downloads the moment the payment clears. Nothing is posted to you and the link does not expire.

A chart from your own picture

If what you want is not in the shop, you can have it charted. The photo to cross stitch converter takes a picture you upload and returns a counted pattern in the same format as the rest of the catalogue, with the chart shown to you in full before you decide to buy it. Pets and single portraits chart best; group shots taken from a distance do not.

Made for coloured and black aida

A good many of these are drawn to be worked on dark cloth, which is not a detail. Rust, marigold and deep green read completely differently against black than they do against white — the dark is doing half the work, and it is why a finished piece looks like the picture rather than a washed out version of it. The commonest shade in each chart is named in the floss key, so you can buy aida in that colour and leave those squares bare rather than stitch a background.

Buying a few? Every pattern is $4, and once five or more are in the basket they all drop to $2 each — so a set costs half what the charts do one at a time. Every pattern you buy is yours to download for good.