FLOSS

How many skeins of floss do I need for a cross stitch?

Practical guide · 6 min read · updated on October 31, 2026

Buying too little floss sends you back to the store, sometimes for a slightly different dye lot. Buying too much is expensive. Here’s how to estimate how many skeins a project needs, thread by thread, with the same guidelines as our calculator.

What’s in a skein

A skein of DMC Mouliné Spécial stranded cotton is 8 meters (8.7 yards) long, just like Anchor or Sullivans. Madeira skeins are 10 meters. The floss is made of 6 strands that you separate: stitched with 2 strands, one skein gives three 8-meter lengths.

How many stitches per skein?

A full cross uses about 1.35 cm (half an inch) of thread per strand on 14-count Aida, including the travel on the back. The finer the fabric, the smaller the cross and the less it uses. Hence these guidelines for one 8 m skein, with no margin:

These are averages: a stitcher who leaves long tails or jumps from area to area on the back uses more.

Counting the stitches of each color

Do the math color by color. Most commercial charts give the number of stitches for each thread in their key. Otherwise, two methods:

• count in blocks of 10 × 10 squares, using the chart’s bold lines;
• estimate the area: a 100 × 80 design that’s half filled has about 4,000 stitches.

Then divide the number of stitches of a color by the figure in the table, and round up. Example: 2,500 stitches in DMC 310 on 14-count Aida with 2 strands gives 2,500 ÷ 1,780 = 1.4, so 2 skeins.

Backstitch and half stitches

Backstitch is often worked with 1 strand and uses little: one skein is almost always enough for the outlines of an average project. A half stitch uses about half the thread of a cross, a three-quarter stitch about three quarters.

Buy everything on the same day

Two skeins of the same number can come from slightly different dye lots. For a large single-color background, buy all the skeins at once, in the same place.

To skip the math, the skein calculator does it for one color, and the thread shopping list for a whole chart. In the stixiva studio, a project’s shopping list is calculated the same way, from the stitches actually placed.