How to Use a PDF Cross-Stitch Pattern on Your iPad or iPhone
A beginner-friendly walkthrough for turning a purchased cross-stitch PDF into a tappable, always-synced chart on iPad and iPhone.
You bought a beautiful cross-stitch chart, it landed in your inbox as a PDF, and now you are squinting at it on a screen — or worse, printing page after page and losing your place every time you set it down. There is a calmer way. With Stitchwork on your iPad or iPhone, your purchased PDF becomes a zoomable, tappable grid you mark off one stitch at a time, with your progress and floss list kept up to date for you. Here is the whole flow, start to finish.
Before you begin: use patterns you own
This guide is for the charts that are yours — patterns you purchased, designs you have a license for, or your own work. Keep your PDFs where you can find them: saved in the Files app, in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or wherever your designer's download landed. Once a pattern is on your device, the rest takes just a few minutes.
Step 1 — Import your PDF
Open Stitchwork and tap to add a new pattern. You can pull the file straight from the Files app, from iCloud Drive, or share it into the app from your email or browser using the iOS share sheet. A photo or scanned image of a paper chart works too, though a vector PDF from a designer gives the cleanest result. Give the project a name you will recognize later, and you are in.
Step 2 — Let the chart line up (or line it up yourself)
Most modern PDF charts are vector files, which means Stitchwork can read the grid, the symbols, and the color key automatically. When that works, you will see your chart appear as a crisp, ready-to-mark grid with the symbols already in place. That is the happy path, and it is common.
When a chart is unusual — an old scan, a quirky layout, a photo — you are never stuck with a failed import. Stitchwork drops back to a calibrated grid overlay: you drag the grid to sit exactly over the squares in your chart, snap it to the corners, and adjust the spacing until each cell lines up. A minute of dragging turns even an awkward file into a fully markable chart. The rule we hold ourselves to is simple: a tricky parse degrades to "line it up yourself," never to a dead end.
Step 3 — Mark stitches as you go
This is the part that replaces the highlighter and the printed page. Pinch to zoom into the section you are working, then tap a cell to mark it complete. Tap again to undo. Pan around the canvas with a finger; the grid stays smooth and fast even on large, dense charts with tens of thousands of stitches. Work in whichever direction suits you — by row, by block, or by color — and the chart remembers every square.
- Zoom in close enough that your fingertip lands on one cell, not three.
- Mark in small batches and glance at your completion percentage to stay oriented.
- Use the same hand position you would with a needle — the goal is fewer mis-taps, not speed records.
Step 4 — Track color with symbol highlight and counts
Working one color at a time is far easier when the app does the hunting for you. Tap a symbol to highlight every cell that uses it across the chart, so a single thread color lights up and the rest recedes. Per-symbol counts show how many of each you have left, and your live completion percentage climbs as you stitch. No more counting squares by eye or marking the wrong shade.
Step 5 — Read your floss list and keep a stash
Stitchwork builds a floss list from your chart's color key automatically, so you can see every thread the pattern calls for in one place. Colors are identified by their DMC numbers, shown as on-screen approximations — handy for matching at a glance, though real thread and real screens always vary, and the app is not affiliated with DMC. Beyond a single project, the floss stash lets you mark what you own versus what you still need, and rolls a buy-list across all your projects so a trip to the craft store covers everything at once.
Step 6 — Sync across iPhone and iPad without losing a stitch
Start on the iPad on the couch, finish a few rows on the iPhone in a waiting room — your progress follows you across your own devices through iCloud. Stitchwork is built to merge your marks rather than overwrite them, so edits from two devices combine, even when one was offline and catches up later. Your patterns and progress live in your own private iCloud; we never see your charts or your stitches. As with anything cloud-based, syncing depends on your iCloud account and Apple's CloudKit being available, but the design goal is plain: never lose a stitch.
A few habits that make it effortless
- Sign in to the same iCloud account on every device so your projects appear everywhere.
- Mark as you stitch rather than catching up at the end — the running count is the whole point.
- Keep your original PDF saved somewhere safe; it is your master copy and proof of purchase.
- Try the free tier first — up to three patterns — then unlock everything once with a single $9.99 purchase, no subscription and no account.
That is the whole loop
Import the PDF you own, let the grid line up or drag it into place, tap your way through the stitches, lean on symbol highlight and the automatic floss list to stay on color, and let iCloud carry your progress between iPad and iPhone. It is the quiet, paper-free way to stitch a chart on iOS — and the one built so a long evening of work is always still there in the morning.