Latch Hook & Needlepoint Grid

Four-millimetre squares

A close grid in grey, with every fifth line drawn heavier. One square is one knot, or one stitch.

Fine enough to hold a design of real size on one sheet, and coarse enough that you can still colour a square in without a technical pen.

Counting is the whole job

The bold fifth line is not decoration. It is what makes a design of two thousand squares workable.

Nobody counts to forty-three reliably. Everybody counts to eight blocks and three, and a chart without those blocks produces designs that come out one row out somewhere in the middle — which is discovered at the point where fixing it means undoing an evening's work.

Latch hook, and gauge

Latch hook canvas comes in a few gauges, most commonly around 3.75 holes to the inch. One square here is one knot regardless of gauge, but the finished size is not.

Work it out before you start: count the squares across your design, divide by your canvas's holes per inch, and that is the finished width. A 60-square-wide design on 3.75-gauge canvas comes out at sixteen inches, and a design charted without that arithmetic comes out at whatever size it happens to be.

Needlepoint and cross stitch

The same grid works for both, with the same caveat about count. Ten-count canvas and eighteen-count canvas turn identical charts into objects of very different sizes.

For cross stitch specifically the cross stitch grid is the same idea sized for aida. For knitting, use the knitting grid instead, whose cells are deliberately not square — a knitted stitch is wider than it is tall, and charting one on a square grid distorts the finished piece.

Charting a design

Start from the centre and work outward. Find the middle square, mark it, and build from there — it is how the canvas is worked, and it means a miscount at the edge does not shift everything.

Use symbols as well as colours if the design has more than a handful of shades. Two similar reds are distinguishable in pencil on Tuesday and identical under a lamp on Saturday, and a symbol key removes the doubt permanently.

Print at 100%

The squares are 4 mm and should measure 4 mm. Check with a ruler before charting anything large — a scaled print is not a disaster for a chart, since one square is one stitch either way, but it does make the sheet harder to work on and impossible to overlay on anything.