Pixel Art Tapestry Crochet Ultimate Guide
Tapestry Crochet

Wazzuuuup Crochet Crew?

Throughout my crochet career so far, I have already had the pleasure to crochet the one or the other pixel art tapestries. While doing so, I have dropped the ball countless times. So, I figured I would share some of the things I have had to learn the hard way, so that y’all don’t have to make the same mistakes that I did. You know, the whole “standing on someone else’s shoulders thing”. Let’s dive right in!

1) Free from tangling until the very end

The Problem

The worst part of tapestry crochet, especially when working on a large design using 3, 4, or even more colors, is the inevitable tangle mess that you end up with eventually. Even more so when you are working on a design that comes with a lot of color changes, which somehow happens to be the case with a lot of really cool designs. And, as if tons of color changes in itself are not enough of a hassle, having to deal with that mess every other row will slow you down even more and is just annoying AF. I cannot even count how many hours I have spent desperately trying to free my multiple yarn balls from each other, only to end up cutting all the yarn to finally get rid of all the knots that have formed.

The Fix

To avoid all your skeins of yarn regularly turning into a non-flying spaghetti monster, do not work off your manufactured balls of yarn, at least not directly. Instead, keep cutting off a couple of meters from every color yarn that you have in use and work from those. Having only the lose ends instead of the whole yarn balls at your hand makes untangling yarn jumble go much smoother, as you can then pull the whole yarn through the loops and knots easily. This will make the regular untangling you are faced with while working up your pixel art tapestry much more manageable.

As you go, you can add to each color the same way as doing a color change (which while doing pixel art, you will do a lot of anyway) OR by knotting to the end, although I would not recommend the latter, as while doing pixel art crochet, you will do tons of color changes anyhow. So, the few extra ends at in the back that result from this technique won’t stand out the least.

You can skip that for the background color though, cause keeping one color on the ball and working directly from there generally works. It only gets really messy when a couple of balls get tangled with each other.

2) Dare to look ahead in your design

The Problem

This one is also about avoiding a mess, but not with all the yarns we are working with, but rather the yarn on the back of the tapestry.

As you are maybe aware, there is 2 different ways of bringing your non-working yarn along to your current position: the carry-on method and the floating yarn method. I’m not a huge fan of the carry-on method, but it results in a nice front and back side, so no mess on the back to take care of. Looking at the floating-yarn technique, however, things are prone to get quite messy again. Especially when working on larger designs, like 56 x 56 pixel squares that come with a single color background that becomes an issue. Because, what that means, when switching back to the background color towards the end of every row, we will have to span the yarn across the whole back of the piece. And the background is not the only place where this can happen, there could be other clusters of certain colors that are spread far across the design.

That leads to a couple of issues such as unnecessarily using more yarn than necessary which obviously is a waste and makes the tapestries heavier than they have to be (and trust me, they will end up heavy enough as it is). Also, leaving the floating yarn at the back too short or too long (chance of that happening increases with more/longer floating yarn of course), can mess up the size of your tapestry and the consistency of the individual stitches. And we don’t want that, do we?

The Fix

So, what you can do to keep the back of your piece as clean as possible is taking the design into account in advance. What I mean by that is looking ahead how the pixels of the design are partitioned. Depending on that, we do not simply limit ourselves to have one cut-off strand of yarn for each color, but will also use separate skeins of the same color for each cluster. This way, we can reduce the distance the floating yarn from the back has to travel when we want to make it the working yarn during a color change again, ideally to almost zero. Best example is the above-mentioned background that will consist of very few stitches at the beginning and end of most rows. This, we will treat kind of as “separate colors” and use one source of yarn for the left side and one source of yarn for the right side of the background. Those can be either separate cut-offs or you can simple work from both, the beginning and end of the same ball of yarn.

Congrats, you're now a pro in crocheting pixel art tapestry! 💯

Feel free to reach out to me via Instagram or E-Mail if you have any questions you wanna hit me with.