How Long Does a Cross Stitch Piece Take?
A comfortable pace is around 14 stitches a minute, so about 850 an hour. On top of that, every 45 cm length of thread costs roughly 45 seconds to cut, separate, thread and anchor. A 15,680 stitch portrait works out at 22 to 28 hours depending on which stitches it uses.
The two numbers that matter
Almost every estimate you find online multiplies stitches by a rate and stops there. That is where they go wrong, because stitching is not the only thing you spend time on.
Rate. A comfortable pace is about 14 stitches a minute. That is 840 an hour, and it holds up reasonably well over a long evening on a solid area. Very fast stitchers reach 25 a minute in a block of one colour, but not for three hours.
Rethreading. You work in lengths of about 45 cm, because longer frays. Every one of those lengths has to be cut, separated into strands, threaded and anchored, and finished off at the end. Call it 45 seconds. It sounds trivial. It is not: on a portrait it comes to five or six hours.
That second number is why estimates feel wrong. Leave it out and you get 17 hours for a piece that takes 22. It is also worth knowing that anchoring a thread does not need a knot, because you are about to do it several hundred times.
Stitches are not equal
Different stitches take different amounts of time, and a chart that leans on the expensive ones costs more evenings than its stitch count suggests.
| Stitch | Time, relative to a full cross |
|---|---|
| Double cross (Smyrna) | 2.2 |
| Full cross | 1.0 |
| Half stitch | 0.6 |
| Backstitch | 0.5 |
| Seed stitch | 0.4 |
A chart that is a quarter double crosses is doing about 30 per cent more work than its stitch count implies. That is not a reason to avoid them, they are what gives a shadow depth. It is a reason to know before you start.
A worked example
One photograph of a dog, converted at 140 by 112 stitches, which is 15,680 squares, on 14 count with two strands. The only difference between the rows is how many colours the chart was allowed to use.
| Palette | Stitching | Rethreading | Needles | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 29 colours | 16.7 h | 5.7 h | 455 | 22.4 h |
| 12 colours | 21.1 h | 6.6 h | 528 | 27.7 h |
| 8 from a stash | 17.2 h | 5.4 h | 430 | 22.5 h |
| 1 colour, DMC 310 | 14.8 h | 4.4 h | 352 | 19.2 h |
Two things in that table are worth sitting with.
The first is that rethreading is a quarter of the total in every row. Four hundred and fifty separate needles, at forty-five seconds each, is most of a working day.
The second is that cutting the palette from 29 colours to 12 made the piece five hours longer. That runs against the intuition that fewer colours means less work. What happens is that the shading has to come from somewhere, and with fewer numbers available it comes from denser stitches: double crosses, at 2.2 times the cost of a plain one. You are trading a shorter shopping list for evenings.
Whether that is a good trade depends on you. A shorter shopping list also means far fewer stranded single stitches to work, which is its own kind of relief.
What the estimate does not include
Be honest with yourself about the gap between hours stitched and hours elapsed.
- Unpicking. Everybody unpicks. Budget five per cent, and know that the price of a late miscount is nothing like five per cent.
- Finding your place again after a week off.
- Sorting floss, winding bobbins, ironing the cloth, mounting it at the end.
- The evenings you sit with it and watch television and do forty stitches.
None of that is waste. It is a large part of why people do this. But if you want a date on the calendar rather than a number of hours, multiply by somewhere between 1.5 and 2.
Making a big piece finishable
Twenty-two hours at two hours a week is three months. That is fine for something you want. What kills projects is not the total, it is the total arriving as one undifferentiated block.
The usual fix is sections. A 140 by 112 chart splits into six blocks of about 50 by 60, each of them roughly three or four hours. Finishing one is a real event, and it gives you a clean place to stop, which is worth more than it sounds: stopping mid row is how you lose your place, and losing your place is how a project ends up in a drawer. Working in sections also makes reading the chart easier, which is a skill of its own.
The other fix is at the very beginning, in the four seconds where you choose a size, which is the decision that spends the year. Ten by eight inches on 14 count is 15,680 stitches. The same design at 100 by 80 squares is 8,000, a bit over half the work, and far more likely to be the one that ends up on a wall. Flossgrid puts the hours next to the size while you are choosing, for exactly this reason, and it counts the rethreading rather than quietly leaving it out.
Questions that come up
How many stitches can you do in an hour?
Somewhere between 600 and 1,200 for most people, with 850 as a fair middle. It depends less on skill than on what is happening: a solid block of one colour goes quickly, a confetti area with a colour change every few stitches goes at a fraction of the rate. Speed also drops as the evening goes on, which no estimate accounts for and everyone notices.
Why is my project taking so much longer than the estimate?
Usually one of three things. The chart has a lot of isolated single stitches, so you are rethreading constantly. You are working on a higher count than the estimate assumed. Or you are counting the hours you sat with it rather than the hours you stitched, which for most people is a factor of two, and is not a problem so much as the point of the hobby.
Does the fabric count change how long it takes?
Not much directly, since a stitch is a stitch. What changes is the strain: on 18 count you go slower because you are working smaller, and you take more breaks. The bigger effect is indirect. Choosing a finer count for the same finished size means more stitches in that area, and more stitches is the thing that costs time.
How do I pick a size I will actually finish?
Work backwards from evenings. If you get two hours in on a good week, a 22 hour piece is about three months. Multiply your first estimate by 1.5 and see whether you still want it. Most abandoned projects were not too hard, they were too big, and the decision that doomed them was made in about four seconds while choosing a size.