Determine the Size of the Pattern

You need to determine the dimensions in stitches for the pattern you’re creating. You can do this using this Cross Stitch Calculator, which allows you to enter dimensions and fabric count (threads per inch) and tells you how many stitches wide and tall the pattern will be.

These are the dimensions I used for my 6 inch hoop Cow Pattern.

Create the Photoshop Document

Start a new document in Photoshop and set your units to pixels. Using the Stitched Area from your calculation results in the last step, set the width and height of the new Photoshop document (one stitch is one pixel).

E.g., if your Stitched Area is 50 stitches wide by 75 stitches high, set your width to 50 pixels and height to 75 pixels.

Setup Tools

Show the grid of the document using View > Show > Grid or ⌘ and '

or Set the Brush to Pencil with a size of 1 pixel.

Set the Eraser to Pencil with a size of 1 pixel.

Your pencil tool and erase tool are setup to create and remove individual pixels. Now it’s time to design your pattern!

Export the Pattern for MacStitch

Once your pattern is complete, you’ll need to export it as a PNG. MacStitch can’t directly import PSD (Photoshop Document) files. We’re using PNG instead of JPEG to ensure there’s no loss in quality.

File > Export > Export As

Import into MacStitch

Now it’s time to import your exported pixel art PNG into MacStitch.

Open MacStitch

Select Convert Image

Choose Advanced Image Import…

Select the PNG of your pattern you exported from Photoshop.

you exported from Photoshop. The Chart Width will automatically be set based on the pixel dimensions of the image.

will automatically be set based on the pixel dimensions of the image. In the “Using these thread colors”, select your thread library . I recommend DMC because it is popular and easy to find.

. I recommend DMC because it is popular and easy to find. Select your Max Colors. It’s better to have too many colors than not enough. For example, my pattern only needs 10 colors, but I bumped the Max Colors to 25 so details aren’t lost during import. Max Colors is only used during the import, you can add, remove, and change colors later as needed.

Click the Preview button to see how the pattern will look when it is imported into MacStitch. Tweak the Max Colors until you’re happy with the preview result. Click OK to convert your image into a pattern.

Clean Up the Import

Every pixel from your Photoshop export is turned into a stitch, and sadly, transparent pixels are turned into white stitches. You need to remove the stitches that were transparent pixels in Photoshop.

Select Erase from the top of Palette on the left.

Select Toolbar > Flood Fill tool or F .

tool or . Click in the white areas you want to remove.

Clean Up Colors

You now need to clean up any extra colors that were created during the import. MacStitch will do its best when importing, but often you’ll end up with more colors than you want. You’ll also want to select final colors that match the floss you want to stitch.

Before and after color palette for 6 inch hoop Cow Pattern.

You’re Done!

Once you’ve cleaned up the colors to your liking, it’s time to export your pattern and start stitching!

Conclusion

Designing in Photoshop and importing into MacStitch has increased my ability to create cross stitch patterns. Let me know if you find this tutorial useful. Do you have another technique for creating patterns? I’d love to hear about it!

You can download the Cow pattern featured in this post on Gumroad.

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