English language, with all its variety of words, seems to lack a word for this craft. In my native tongue, Serbian, the word is tapiserija, which could translate as tapestry. However, tapestry – defined as “a piece of cloth with a pattern or picture that is created by sewing or weaving different colored threads onto a special type of strong cloth” – is not exactly it, as this process doesn’t involve sewing, embroidery or weaving, but rather knot making with a latch hook.
When I was a very young kid, I used to sit in a small wicker chair at my Oma’s house and work on one such tapestry after a chart found in some magazine. It was some kind of nature scene, but I can’t recall what exactly was on it, or whether I had ever finished it. I had an itch to do it again, so I opted for a pillowcase and a chart based on a photo of my choosing.
Craft sections of stores sell latch hook kits that include pre-cut yarn, base cloth that could also be a plastic mesh with design printed on it (otherwise there would be a color chart), yet they usually do not include latch hook itself. There are very few nice designs in those store-bought kits, so they may leave you wanting to use your own photo or design for a rug, wall decoration or pillowcase. And if that’s the case, read on for a quick tutorial, or skip down to a video showing how latch hook work is done.
Tutorial
What’s needed for this project:
- Yarn (can be acrylic, wool, cotton or blend, for best results the yarn would be of similar thickness and material)
- Monk’s cloth
- Photograph in digital format
- Photoshop
- Printer to print out the chart
- Latch hook
- Scissors
- Folded piece of cardboard for cutting yarn, or a rectangular piece of metal
First, start off by gathering all the yarn you can use. In my case, I ended up ordering over 30 different colors of Sugar N’ Cream and Bernat cotton yarn, because I didn’t have leftover yarn from knitting projects that I could use.
As a logical next step, pick a photograph that you want to use and then decide which colors to use and how many. Here’s what that step looked like:

In addition, decide on the size of finished piece and take your monk’s cloth (or similar rug making canvas or plastic mesh, though I don’t recommend those for pillows) and measure width and height and use a pen to mark the lines. Then, mark additional grid lines at 10 hole intervals. It’s not necessary to draw these lines with a ruler, drawing them freehand will be fine as the fabric itself will guide the stroke of the pen. As you can see below, these lines connect the rows and columns of holes in the fabric.

A word of caution: monk’s cloth may not be woven evenly width and length-wise, as I discovered. For instance, I was going for 16×16″ pillow, which width-wise was equal to 125 holes, while length-wise it was a little less, about 121 holes, so I ended up skipping the topmost four rows of the chart, since with 121 rows I already reached 16″ in height. So at this stage it’s best to rely on your ruler or tape measure instead of hole count if you have particular size requirements.
Now that you have the idea of the size and hole count you’ll go with, it’s time to finalize the photo. Each knot (or, we could say each hole) will be one pixel of the photo. So let’s bring it into Photoshop and crop it. Press C to switch to crop tool, then in the tool options bar there are two fields that let us input the aspect ratio of the crop box. Enter the numbers of your holes first for width and then height and then adjust the crop box to encompass the part of the image to be converted into a chart. This may not result in correct size when it comes to pixel count, but will establish the area to be used for chart with correct aspect ratio. Next, resize the image to number of pixels corresponding to number of holes on monk’s cloth. I used Nearest Neighbor resampling to keep the sharpness of the image and recommend experimenting with different resampling algorithms to see which one yields best results.

With thousands and thousands of photos on my hard drive, I decided to go with one that was technically pretty bad: shot in semi-dark with backlit subjects. Luckily, Photoshop can help with some of these issues, and the detail isn’t important since the final image is so tiny. Adjust all that you need to till you’re happy with the result.

Next step involves making a digital inventory of yarn colors to be used. Create a new document in Photoshop and create a square selection, then on a new layer fill it with first color, then repeat the process for the rest of the colors. It’s a process of eyeballing – looking at the color of yarn and picking a color in Photoshop that looks like it. Alternatively, you could take a photo of all your yarn in even light and sample colors from the photo. I also typed the yarn color names next to the swatches. This will be useful later when the work with latch hook commences and we look at the chart to see which color we need to cut next. If you don’t have the labels for yarn, give some descriptive name to the yarn so that you know which it is. I had few of those without labels, so I named them after where they came from – my mom’s yarn collection. The color swatches can be replicated by either duplicating a layer and re-filling the swatch to represent different color, or making selections and filling them up with color, or using vector shapes. It may be helpful here to turn on the grid and snap selection box to it to create perfectly aligned squares of the same size. At this point it’s not crucial to have the colors of yarn match the colors in photograph exactly, but try to be somewhat close.
With this done, it’s time to make color swatch file out of our yarn colors. Save the PSD with yarn color swatches, then hide text, leave color swatches visible, and fill the background layer with one of the yarn colors from the swatches so that background color is not added to the palette. Go to Image > Mode > Indexed Color. Click OK to merge visible and discard hidden layers. In the Indexed Color dialog, set the Palette to Exact. With that set, you should see the exact number of yarn colors you made swatches for in this document.

Click OK to close the dialog, then go to Image > Mode > Color Table… Here you will see your yarn colors in custom color table. Click on Save… and give your color table a name and save it. This will save out color table file with .act extension. Now you can close your Photoshop document without saving it to discard conversion to indexed colors and keep all your text and layers.
Get back to your cropped photograph and convert it to indexed color by again going to Image > Mode > Indexed Color… In the dialog, for palette select Custom… and when new dialog appears, click Load… and then locate the .act file you saved previously. This will apply your yarn colors to your photograph, and it will do a pretty good job of matching colors from this color table to the colors of the photograph.
Once you OK that dialog, you’ll see that your photo has changed and has fewer colors. If you’re not happy with the look, you can go back to adjust the photo before applying yarn color table, such as changing levels, contrast and any other aspect, then applying the yarn color table again to see if result looks better. Fiddle with this until you’re happy with the look, but bear in mind that you’ll end up with only as many colors as you have in yarn color table, so the photo will look posterized and pixelated.
Creating a Chart
To start with, I first decide on the size of the grid which will house the chart. There are a few considerations with this. While it is possible to work from a chart displayed on the screen, my preference was to have it printed out. After some experimentation, the grid cell size of 20×20 pixels turned out to be pretty good as it would have enough pixels to clearly display contained symbol. So the way I went about creating a chart is as follows.
Create a new photoshop document that is 20×20 pixels in size. Background is white and all there is in this document are two black lines, horizontal and vertical, like so:

Now, select everything (ctrl + A) and go to Edit > Define Pattern. Give pattern a name such as GridPattern, and click OK. Now go to Type > Panels > Glyphs Panel. This will bring up the panel that contains all the symbols available for selected font. Back in our 20×20 pixel document, we return to plain white background with no lines, switch to type tool, set size to 5pt and click in the white square, then pick a symbol from the glyphs chart and double click it to insert it into type field. Get out of type tool, resize and reposition the symbol to the middle of the square, but slightly to the right and bottom, as if the black grid lines were there. Select all, and define new pattern (Edit > Define Pattern) and then give it a name. Repeat for as many symbols as you have yarn colors. When choosing symbols it’s helpful to pick a nice variety: some thick and dark, and some small and light, some in between. When assigning them to colors use dark, thick ones for dark colors and light ones for bright colors to avoid confusion that may be there before the symbol and corresponding color are memorized.
As the next step, let’s create one more document. To determine the size for it, multiply the number of holes for width with 20, and add another 300 pixels, so we have 150 pixels on either size of the chart, and do the same for height but add more pixels, as we’ll have our legend under the chart. The size can be changed later with crop tool, or canvas size adjustment, if there’s not enough room for legend. It’s good idea to have the rulers visible and set to pixels (Ctrl + R to show rulers, and to set them to pixels go to Edit > Preferences > Unites & Rulers and set units to pixels for rulers).
Now fill the document with grid pattern by selecting the paint bucket tool and switching the fill from Foreground to Pattern and selecting gird pattern from the drop-down menu. There are many ways to proceed with this, and here’s the way I went on about it. I created a new layer, filled it with white, then used the rulers and snap to grid (which was also set to pixels), and created a selection box that was positioned 150 pixels to the right and 150 pixels down from the top of document and was 2500 pixels wide and 2500 pixels tall, so it ran from 150 to 2650 pixels horizontally and vertically. Now invert selection (ctrl+shift+I) and create mask for the white filled layer so that the grid shows only where chart will be. And now we have an empty chart. Let’s add subdivision lines at 10 square intervals by creating a horizontal line with a pen tool, then stroking it on a new layer with black color and hard brush that’s 2 pixels in size so that the lines will be slightly thicker than our grid lines. You can also add numbers at each subdivision line. Next, open up your document that has yarn colors with their labels and paste that as topmost layer below the empty chart. If it’s too long of a list, break it into two columns. At this point, the document will look like this:

As you can see I also added 20×20 pixel squares next to yarn color swatches so that I can fill it with a symbol pattern. Then, open up your cropped photograph that was converted to indexed color and size it back up 20 times by simply typing *20 next to either width or height value, and choose nearest neighbor resample method:

Finally, copy this sized up photo and paste it into chart document. If all went well, the image will perfectly align with the visible grid. Move this layer below the grid layer, and set grid layer to multiply so that the grid lines are visible. And now comes the final part of replacing the color with symbol. So let’s start with first color in the legend. Clear selection, then go to Select > Color Range… Set fuzziness to 0 and click with eyedropper into the first yarn color swatch in the legend. The selection preview image in the dialog box will show in white the areas with that color. Click OK and switch to paint bucket tool, and set the fill to pattern, then select the symbol pattern created previously that will represent the selected color. Again, it will be helpful to pick dark, thick symbol for dark colors. Then, create a new layer and click inside selection to fill it with symbol pattern which should be perfectly aligned with the grid. Repeat for all the rest of the colors. The final chart will look something like this:

Here’s the detail at 100% zoom level:

That’s it for the chart. Now if you print it on a single letter size sheet of paper, the grid might be too small and chart hard to read. Some printers allow splitting a document into multiple pages; mine (Canon D530) has poster [2×2] page layout, but if yours doesn’t, you can manually split the document into four. The way I’d do it is to put guides in the middle of the document horizontally and vertically, then making a selection of top left area and copying merged (ctrl+shift+c) and pasting that into a new document, then printing it normally, and repeating this for the other three parts. Then, use scissors and tape to cut and tape together the printouts to make a single sheet.
At this point, the work with latch hook can commence. Start at the bottom left corner and do the 10×10 square first starting from bottom row and working your way up, then continue on to the next one to the right. For cutting yarn, I used folded cardboard that’s about 3″ in length and 1″ wide (that’s 2″ folded over). This cardboard was cut from CapriSun juicebox carton, as the lip of the lid is exactly 1″, so I’d just fold if over and cut. Then, when cutting the yarn, I would wind it around this piece of cardboard, and then run the scissors in between the cardboard to cut the yarn. To cut yarn into even pieces, avoid winding more than one layer on top of already wound yarn. See video below for the process in action:
This project requires a lot of time and patience – bear that in mind and plan accordingly. It took me almost a month to complete. One 10×10 square would take me about 40 minutes, and the most I did in a day was 8 squares, which is 800 knots out of 15,625 total for my 16×16″ pillowcase. But it was worth doing, not just in terms of finished product, but it also impacts well-being by improving concentration and clearing mind chatter as focus is needed to follow the chart.
A helpful hint: use a piece of paper with two small marks on top of it that match the 10 grid cell subdivision lines, and position it just below the row you are about to do. That way when you glance at your chart, you’ll know exactly where you’re at, and the markings on the paper will help show where exactly your 10×10 cell is, as sometimes those lines may not be very obvious with all the symbols around. As you complete the row, move the piece of paper up to cover completed row and outline the next row to be worked on.
Good luck / have fun! 🙂