Fair Isle knitting and cross-stitch pattern generator

Patterns knitted in bands

Fair Isle knitting takes its name from a small island in the Shetland archipelago, off the coast of Scotland. The knitter carries two or more colors of yarn along the row and brings each one to the front where the chart asks for it, producing horizontal bands of small repeating motifs. Similar sweaters are knitted in Norway, Iceland and across the north of Europe, with snowflakes, stars and reindeer.

The same charts work in cross-stitch, where every square of the chart is one cross on a woven fabric, and in beadwork and pixel art. Each cell of the chart has one color, and it is the repetition of small motifs in bands that gives the pattern its character.

How the generator builds them

Ornamatic lays out a chart that is 24 stitches wide. The width is chosen so that motifs 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12 or 24 stitches wide repeat whole across it, so nothing is cut off at the edges. Each band gets a motif from the generator’s set: diamonds, snowflakes, hearts, rosettes, zigzags or checks. Bands can have borders of dots above and below, and every other band can be tinted with the third color.

The chart is then drawn as stitches: a knitted V, which is taller than it is wide, a cross, or a plain square. The bands stack into a tile that repeats exactly.

What you can adjust

• Stitch — knitted V, cross stitch or pixel.
• Bands — from one to eight bands of motifs in one tile.
• Stitch height — how tall each stitch is, relative to its width.
• Borders and tinted bands — dotted borders around the bands and alternating tinted bands.
• Other motifs — a new choice of motifs for the bands.
• Colors — any palette.

Export and use

Download the seamless tile as PNG or SVG, or copy a ready CSS background. The patterns you create are free to use, personally or commercially.