Knitting Chart Maker

How to make it

1. Enter your gaugeType stitches and rows per 4 inches or 10 cm from your swatch. The maker sets the cell proportions from those two numbers.
2. Add a picture and size itUpload an image and choose the width in stitches. Limit colors, then preview the motif repeated across the fabric for stranded work.
3. Check and printFix rows flagged for too many colors, then download a chart PDF with a color key, ready to clip beside your needles.

Why knitting stitches are not square

A typical stockinette swatch in worsted yarn might measure 20 stitches and 28 rows over 4 inches. Each stitch is then about 0.2 inches wide but only about 0.14 inches tall. Chart a circle on square paper, knit it, and it comes out as a wide, flat oval.

The fix is to chart on cells with the same shape as your stitches. Here, the gauge you enter sets the ratio, so a 20 by 28 gauge gives cells about 1.4 times wider than they are tall. When a picture is converted, it is fitted to that grid, which means a portrait needs more rows than a square chart would suggest. What you see on screen is close to what will come off the needles.

That is also why a swatch matters for colorwork. Stranded fabric is usually tighter than plain stockinette, so swatch in the pattern, wash and dry it, then measure.

Fair isle and stranded colorwork

Traditional fair isle uses two colors in any one row, with the unused color stranded loosely across the back. Many modern yokes use three in a few rows, but each extra strand makes tension harder and the fabric stiffer. The maker counts the colors in every row and warns when a row goes over your limit, so you can recolor before knitting it.

Float length is the other thing to watch. When one color is absent for a long stretch, the strand behind becomes a long loop that catches fingers and rings. A common guideline is to catch, or trap, floats longer than about five stitches or an inch. Motifs that alternate colors often, such as peeries, stars and small checks, keep floats short naturally.

The repeat preview tiles your motif side by side and stacked, the way it will run around a hat or a yoke. Seeing several repeats together shows awkward joins and diagonal lines that are invisible in a single tile. For a hat in the round, choose a repeat that divides evenly into your cast-on count.

Intarsia: big blocks, many colors

Intarsia knits separate areas of color with their own bobbins, twisting yarns at each color change and never stranding across the back. A single row can contain many colors, as long as each sits in its own block. Pictures with large clean shapes, like a heart on a sweater front, a dog's head or a big initial, suit intarsia well.

For an intarsia chart, raise the color limit per row, keep shapes chunky and remove isolated stitches; one stitch of a color means one more bobbin for almost no visual effect. Duplicate stitch, embroidered on afterward, is a good way to add eyes or tiny details that would be a pain to knit.

Reading the chart

Knitting charts are read from the bottom up. In flat knitting, right-side rows are read right to left and wrong-side rows left to right, because the work turns. In the round, every round is read right to left, as you always face the right side. Row numbers printed along the chart edge help you keep track.

Printing a copy and moving a ruler or a strip of sticky tape up one row at a time is the simplest way not to lose your place. Lightly mark finished repeats with a pencil so you can see at a glance how many times the motif has been worked across.

Making a chart from a picture

Knitting has far fewer stitches than most pictures have pixels. A child's sweater front might be 80 stitches across, which is enough for a clear animal head or lettering but not for a detailed photograph. Bold, simple images with two to five colors give the most knittable charts.

Choose the width from the piece you are making: stitches across equals finished width times your stitches per inch. A 9-inch-wide motif at 5 stitches per inch is 45 stitches. Then let the gauge decide rows. Single stray stitches are cleaned toward their neighbors, and you can recolor any cell before printing.

On-screen yarn colors are only a guide. Hold real skeins together before buying, and squint at them: colors that look different but have similar lightness will blur into each other in stranded work.

Letters are the most charted motif in knitting, from names on stockings to initials on a cardigan pocket. Knitted letters need a little more height than width because of the stitch shape: on a typical gauge, capitals about 7 stitches wide and 9 or 10 rows tall look upright rather than stretched. Keep strokes at least one stitch thick and leave one stitch between letters so floats stay short.

Other crafts from the same picture

Want the same motif in crochet? The crochet chart maker handles row-based colorwork and the C2C graph maker writes diagonal tile rows. For square-grid charts with floss colors, try the photo cross stitch maker. Charts are kept locally on this computer or phone; export a .stitch file to carry one elsewhere.