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Cross-stitch floss usage calculator

Thread for a number of crosses, as a range rather than a single number — because a single number would be wrong and would not say so.

Thread for a number of crosses

For one colour, or for the whole chart if you want the total. The chart page of any pattern on this site prints the count per colour.

Threads or blocks per inch, as the fabric is sold: 14 for 14 aida, 28 for 28 count linen.

Optional. Some brands wind one article to a different length than the rest of the range; giving the code picks that length up.

Optional, and it wins over the brand: if you are holding the skein, you have the only figure that is certainly right.

How this is worked out

One reference skein of eight metres works somewhere between 1 500 and 2 250 full crosses on 14 count in two strands. That corridor is the same one this site's shopping list uses, and the numbers here are it read backwards: the metres are the crosses scaled by the count and by the strands, and the skeins are those metres divided by the length your brand actually winds.

The corridor is a quarter wide, and it is honest about why. How much thread a cross takes depends on how you travel on the back, whether you loop-start, how much you waste at the beginning and the end of a length, and how tightly you stitch. Nobody's figure is the same as anybody else's; a calculator that prints one number to two decimal places is guessing with more confidence than the craft allows.

Strands are folded into the corridor rather than measured separately: the corridor is stated for two strands, so three strands cost one and a half of it and one strand half of it. And the shopping figure is the pessimistic end with a reserve on top, because being one skein short in the middle of a sky is a worse afternoon than having one left over.