How do you make your own cross-stitch pattern and use it on Pattern Keeper?

Well, I had been wondering the same thing myself. Until I had an ah-ha moment. So let me explain this ah-ha moment. There were many ah-ha moments as you will see.

I had been wanting to cross-stitch a picture that a friend of mine from a mobile game that we both played on. She was an older gal who has passed away I believe as I can't get in touch with her in-game and on the chat app for game players. I figured I could still do this one picture of hers. It has been my testing picture. It had been through many revisions with pattern conversion programs. With working with her picture the original picture was never damaged with importing to a pattern maker program. 

Lately, I have been working with PC Stitch 11 Pro. I was able to do the editing and sizing with no problem. However, I was still having issues with how to print, save, and share. It turned out to be really large as far as how many pages of paper it needed to be printed up. So this set me off to finding a way to have it in a digital form. This led to even more of a few more headaches.

I turned to the internet but nothing was ever clear on how to do this. I had to piece everything together and a lot of trial and error. The first thing that I learned was that with saving as a .PAT it can’t be printed or shared. The next clue that I found was that I needed to save it as a .PDF. With that, there were all kinds of recommendations for PDF programs. But after much frustration, I found that not to be true. To save it as a .PDF I needed to be in the print screen and have the printer changed from our normal printer to print to PDF. But also need to have the box checked to print to file. That was the ah-ha moment. 

The next ah-ha moment was how to share it and have it be able to import a pattern into a digital form. With more trial and error and emailing it to myself, I could get it on my cellphone and use Pattern Keeper. At first, I wasn’t able to get the pattern imported correctly. Then when I finally got a pattern to import, the threads wouldn’t load on their own and the symbols weren’t liked. All the thread colors had to be manually inputted. I remembered in one clue that I needed to change the symbol font from PC Stitch 3 to PC Stitch 2.  The next headache was the fact that when I imported the picture to PC Stitch11 the default setting was for the PC Stitch 3. So I had to change every symbol in the legend to a PC Stitch 2.  

So that you don’t have to go through all of the frustrations that I went through on figuring out how to make your favorite picture into a cross-stitch pattern this is how you do it or if you don’t want to or have the programs and apps to do so I do offer that service for your convenience and you will have to print the pattern and kit it up yourself.

Steps to making your own pattern.

1. Choose your picture.

2. Open PC Stitch. There will be a pop-up for new, open, and recently used. Here you will choose new.

3. The next pop-up is pattern properties. This can be adjusted when you import your picture. Click OK.

4. Scroll over to the import/export tab. This is where you will import your picture to  PC Stitch.

5. Choose where you are getting your picture from. File or camera. Or if you are working on a previously imported picture.

6. If from a file you click on browse and look in the area of your computer where the file is located. And open the file with this pop-up.

7. The next window is where you do a lot of your work at.

a) Under the grayed side of the window click the preview. This is where you will start to see all of your adjustments to your picture.

b) If the picture is pixelated try changing the stitch width to match the pixels of the picture. There is a limit of 999 width stitches. So if the pixels are larger than that you will need to do a cropping. 

c) Now is the time to do the fine-tuning of your picture. This is where you will spend a lot of time doing your fine-tuning. In the fine-tuning you will be choosing what size count you want to work on, the clarity of the picture with the width of stitch count.

d) Once you are satisfied with the fine-tuning click OK.

8. Now once the pattern is imported you can do more editing. Under the tools tab, you will find a few things that are very helpful in your pattern-making. Here you can change the pattern size if you are not happy about the size of it. You can also have the pattern maker mark the center from the top and left side of the pattern so you don’t have to figure it out.

9.  Once you are all satisfied with the symbols, colors, size, and clarity of design now it is time to print it off or save it to a PDF file for transfer to your digital pattern application. That is a whole subset of instructions, but once you have done it a time or two it will be easy and quick.

Printing of your pattern:

1. Open up the print screen.

2. Switch to PDF. I use Microsoft Print to PDF for the printer selection.  Here you can give it a name if you haven’t already when you first opened up the PC Stitch.

3. Choose a size of 6 for each page to be only pattern and no legend on one side of the page.

4. Under the information tab of the print screen choose everything that you want to be printed on the information page(s).

5. Then click print to print to paper.

If you are printing to digital you follow the above instructions except you do a little more between steps 2 and 3. Next to the box where it says Microsoft Print to PDF there is a raised button that says Printer Set up. Click on that button and check the Print to File. Then OK. Then down at the bottom click on Print. This will save your pattern to a PDF that you will be able to upload to a pattern keeper application for you.

But you will still want to save your newly created pattern with the PC Stitch extension of .PAT. That is done with the disk icon in the upper left corner of the PC Stitch program. I highly recommend this saving if you have to come back and change something on your created pattern.

There you go on how to create your own pattern with PC Stitch 11.

Happy stitching.