How to make a cross stitch Christmas ornament from a photo
An ornament is the smallest piece worth making from a picture, and the one most likely to be finished before December. It is also the size where a grid of squares throws the most away. Here is what survives at 42 stitches square, and what to do when your photo doesn’t.
Short answer
On 14-count Aida a 3″ ornament is 42 × 42 stitches, about 1,764 in all. That is enough for a bold shape, a pet’s head or a monogram, and not enough for a recognisable human face. Choose a photo with a clean silhouette, keep the colour count low, stitch it, then mount it on padded card or in a small hoop.
Try it on your photo Gingham shows the whole pattern before you pay anything.
How big is a cross stitch ornament?
Ornament size is decided by one piece of arithmetic, the same one behind every other cross stitch decision:
So a 3″ ornament on 14-count is 3 × 14 = 42 stitches each way.
Gingham’s smallest cross stitch size is exactly that: a 42 × 42 grid, labelled “Ornament 3″” because that is what it measures on 14-count. Change the fabric and the same 42 × 42 chart finishes at a different size, without a single stitch being added or removed:
| Fabric | Grid | Finished size | Feel |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11-count | 42 × 42 | about 3.8″ | Chunky, easiest on the eyes |
| 14-count | 42 × 42 | 3″ | The usual ornament size |
| 16-count | 42 × 42 | about 2.6″ | Neater, needs good light |
| 18-count | 42 × 42 | about 2.3″ | Small enough to be fiddly |
Those are the four counts Gingham offers. 14-count is the count most kits and patterns are designed around, which is why 3″ is the ornament size everyone pictures. Whichever you choose, buy fabric with a generous margin — roughly 3″ spare on every side — because an ornament needs fabric to pull round the back when you mount it. Aida count explained has the full sizing and fabric-buying sums.
Which photos survive 42 × 42 stitches?
A pattern made from a photo is full coverage: every one of those 1,764 squares gets a stitch, background included. At this size the grid is the whole constraint. A whole face gets maybe 20 stitches across, which is fewer than the eyes alone need.
What works:
- One subject, cropped tight. A pet’s head, a single tree, a house, a bauble, a star, a snowflake.
- A clean silhouette. If the shape still reads when you squint at the photo on your phone, it will read in stitches.
- Big blocks of flat colour and a background that contrasts with the subject.
- Letters and numbers, if they are large and plain — a year, an initial, a name of four or five characters.
What doesn’t: group photos, anything with a busy background, thin detail such as string lights or bare branches, and faces. Faces are the honest disappointment of the ornament size. If the piece has to be somebody’s face or a detailed pet portrait, step up a size rather than shrinking the subject — see turning a pet photo into a pattern for why fur and eyes push you to a 6″ hoop or larger, and how to turn a photo into a cross stitch pattern for choosing and cropping the picture.
Crop before you convert, not after. A 42 × 42 grid spent on empty background is detail you never get back.
How many colours should an ornament have?
Fewer than you think. Gingham starts a cross stitch pattern at 20 colours and allows up to 60, but those caps are sized for wall art, not for a 3″ square. On an ornament, somewhere around 8 to 15 colours keeps the shape readable and the stitching pleasant.
Two things push the number down at this size:
- Confetti. Single stray stitches of a colour that appears nowhere near them are slow to stitch and muddy to look at, and a small grid is where they hurt most. Reducing confetti is mostly a matter of asking for fewer colours.
- Thread you have to buy. Every colour on the key is a skein, however few stitches it covers. Ten colours is ten skeins for a piece that uses a fraction of any of them.
Ornament charts are also where a restricted palette looks deliberate rather than cheap. Two greens, a red, a gold and a background will carry a tree; more than that and the tree starts to look like a photograph of a tree, which is not what a stitched ornament is for.
How much floss does an ornament need?
Very little thread, and more skeins than that suggests. A rough working figure for full crosses on 14-count Aida with 2 strands is about 960 stitches per skein — the estimate Gingham uses — so the entire 1,764-stitch ornament is under two skeins’ worth of cotton.
But you buy floss by colour, not by total. Each colour rounds up to a whole skein, so a 12-colour ornament is a 12-skein shopping list even though most of those skeins come back almost untouched. That is the argument for stitching several ornaments in one sitting from one palette, and for keeping the colour count down in the first place. How many skeins of floss you need covers the maths for the larger sizes, where it matters in the other direction.
How to finish a cross stitch ornament
Finishing is a separate craft from stitching, and it is where most ornaments stall in a drawer. The published tutorials differ in the details but agree on the shape of it:
- Press it from the back, face down on a towel, with a cloth between the iron and the stitches.
- Cut two shapes of stiff card — circles or squares — to your finished size, and a layer of thin batting or felt for each.
- Pad and cover the front. Batting on the card, stitching over the batting, then pull the fabric round to the back and hold it with lacing across the back or a running stitch worked as a drawstring.
- Cover the second card the same way with a backing fabric.
- Join the two, wrong sides together, with small stitches or glue round the edge, then hide the seam under cord or ribbon and leave a loop at the top to hang it.
The shortcut, if that sounds like a lot: leave the piece in a small embroidery hoop. Ornament hoops are sold at around 3 to 4 inches, the back is trimmed and glued, and a ribbon through the clasp is the whole hanging mechanism.
One thing to know before you plan the design: a photo pattern is full crosses only. There are no backstitch outlines and no fractional stitches in a Gingham chart, so the shape has to survive on blocks of colour alone. That suits ornaments better than it suits portraits.
Will it be finished by Christmas?
As of 23 September 2026, Christmas Day is 93 days away — a little over 13 weeks. An ornament is the one size where that is a comfortable answer rather than an anxious one: 1,764 stitches is roughly 12 hours at 150 stitches an hour, which is an evening a week until the end of October, finishing included.
That also makes ornaments the sensible way to give handmade presents to more than one person. Four ornaments from the same palette come to about 48 stitching hours between them; one 14″ pillow is 256, and it does not post as easily. If you are weighing a bigger piece instead, run the numbers first: how long cross stitch takes has the hours for every size Gingham offers, and the honest verdict is that a 14″ pillow started in late September is next year’s present.
Whatever you pick, stop stitching a week or two before the date. Mounting, glue drying and posting all still have to happen after the last stitch.
Your photo, at ornament size
Gingham turns a photo from your phone into a cross stitch chart with DMC colors, symbols, stitch counts and a skein estimate, in sizes from a 3″ ornament to 16 × 20″ wall art — and your photo never leaves the device. Build and inspect the whole pattern free; saving and exporting it as a PDF is Gingham Pro, a weekly or annual subscription with a 3-day free trial.
