How many colors should a cross stitch pattern have?

Every extra shade buys you a little more detail and costs you a whole skein, a bobbin to wind and another set of thread changes. Here is where the trade sits, with the arithmetic rather than a vibe.

Written by the developer of Gingham · Published 7 October 2026

Try it on your photo Gingham shows the whole pattern, and its thread list, before you pay anything.

What the number actually buys you

A color only earns its place if it covers enough squares to read as something. Divide the stitch count by the number of colors and you get the average share each shade gets. Here are Gingham’s cross stitch size presets, at 14-count:

Averages, and real patterns are lopsided: a sky or a background can take a third of the piece on its own, which leaves the rest of the key with far less than the column says. Grids are Gingham’s presets; the inches are those grids divided by the fabric count, so the same chart is smaller on 18-count and larger on 11-count. See Aida count explained.

Read the last column again for the small sizes. Sixty colors on a 3″ ornament gives each shade twenty-nine stitches — not a shape, a smudge. That is the real argument against a high number on a small piece, and it is why size and color count have to be chosen together rather than one after the other.

Why you get fewer colors than you asked for

Set the control to 40 and the finished key often holds 33. That is not a bug, and it happens in every converter. In Gingham, three things trim the list:

1. Shades merge when they snap to thread. The app squares your photo down to the grid first, then groups those squares into as many color clusters as you asked for and snaps each cluster to the nearest real floss code in its DMC palette of 489 shades. Two clusters that land on the same code become one color.
2. Empty colors are dropped. Once every square has been assigned, any color that ended up with no squares at all leaves the key.
3. Reduce confetti absorbs the stragglers. With that setting on, which is the default, a stitch with no same-color neighbour takes the color around it. A shade that only ever appeared as lone stitches can vanish entirely. More on that in what confetti is and how to avoid it.

So the colors control reads something like “18 used · up to 60”: the first number is what the chart really contains, the second is the ceiling. The desktop converter cstitch documents the same effect in its own worked example — 30 colors requested came out as 28 after the grid step, and 60 came out as 51.

What every extra color costs

Thread is bought by the skein, and you cannot buy a fifth of one. Gingham estimates about 960 full crosses per skein at 14-count with two strands, rounds up, and never goes below one. That gives a floor nobody can argue with: the number of skeins can never be lower than the number of colors. Thirty colors means at least thirty skeins to buy, wind and keep track of, whatever the chart does with them.

On the three smallest presets above, the average color at 20 gets well under 960 stitches, so most of the key needs exactly one skein and the shopping list comes out about as long as the color count. Push that ornament to 60 colors and it is at least sixty skeins to work 1,764 crosses — one skein for every twenty-nine stitches, on average. Full working in how many skeins of floss do you need.

The other costs are quieter but real: every color is a bobbin, a line in the key to find, and a thread change each time it reappears. That is the part that turns a weekend into a month.

How many colors for a beginner pattern?

Beginner guides broadly agree on under 20, with large blocks of one color so you spend the first hours learning tension rather than hunting symbols. That advice was written for charted designs, though, and a chart made from a photo is full coverage: there is no blank linen to leave, so even a modest piece is solid stitching edge to edge.

If this is a first photo project, the honest version of the advice is to go small and generous rather than large and detailed. A 6″ hoop at 20 colors gives each shade about 350 stitches, which is enough for real areas of color, and it finishes. See how long cross stitch takes for what those grids mean in hours.

How to pick the number in Gingham

1. Pick the finished size first. The Colors control and the size preset argue with each other, and size wins — see turning a photo into a cross stitch pattern.
2. Start at the default of 20 and look at the chart, not the photo.
3. Tap More colors only where something specific is failing: a face going flat, a gradient banding, a logo losing an edge. Stop the moment the chart stops changing.
4. Watch the “used · up to” line. If adding five to the setting adds one to the used count, you have found the point where the photo has no more distinct shades to give.
5. Check the thread list under the chart. Every color gets a card with its DMC code and an estimated skein, ordered by how much of the chart it covers, and the line above totals it up: stitches, colors, skeins and finished size. Watch the skein total climb one-for-one as you add shades that barely show.

The ceiling is different for each craft, because the materials are: Gingham allows 60 colors for cross stitch, 40 for fuse beads, 16 for crochet, 12 for an alpha bracelet and 8 for knitting, where every extra color in a row is another strand to carry behind the work.

See the color count and the thread bill together

Gingham converts your photo on the phone and shows the finished chart with its key: every color with its DMC code and an estimated skein, and a total for the whole piece — before you pay anything. Saving and exporting the PDF need Gingham Pro, a weekly or annual subscription with a 3-day free trial.