Free · runs in your browser
A photograph,
4,635 lines
of thread.
Give it a photo and it works out the winding order for one continuous thread, wrapped once around each nail in a ring. Print the nail map, hit play, and follow the numbers.
- No account
- No upload
- No watermark
- Works offline
Johannes Vermeer, c. 1665, Mauritshuis · public domain. Solved by the studio, not touched up.
240
nails on a 21 in ring
4,635
crossings in the girl with a pearl earring
2.0 km
of thread for it
6–11 h
of winding
Never made one? Start here
It is one piece of thread.
Not a bundle of separate lines, and nothing tied to anything else. You tie on at nail 1, and from then on the thread goes straight across the board to another nail, once around it, straight back across to another, and so on for a few thousand crossings.
No single crossing looks like anything. The picture appears because the solver chose which nails to visit: where hundreds of threads happen to overlap the board reads black, where few pass it stays white, and everything in between is a shade of grey. Stand two metres back and the individual threads disappear.
Your whole job is to keep your place in a list of numbers. That is what the player is for — it says the next nail out loud so both your hands can stay on the thread.
Not one piece per line. A single strand runs the whole piece, joined only if it snaps.
Round the post once, then straight off to the next number. Never twice.
No single line means anything. Where hundreds happen to overlap, the board goes dark.
The whole process
Four steps between a photo and a wall.
- 01
Frame the photo
Drag to crop inside the board outline, then set the shape, the size, the nail count and how dark the thread should read. A live preview shows exactly what the solver sees.
- 02
Solve the winding order
A greedy solver picks chord after chord, each one the single line that removes the most remaining darkness. A few thousand of them add up to a photograph.
- 03
Print the nail map
Every board size comes as a tiled PDF at true scale, with a 10 cm ruler bar on the cover so you can prove your printer did not shrink it.
- 04
Wind and follow
The player reads the nail numbers out loud and keeps your place, so both hands stay on the thread. Close the tab; it remembers where you stopped.
Same engine, three subjects
Watch it wind.
Three public-domain pictures put through the studio exactly as you would put through your own, at 240 nails with black thread and no retouching afterwards. They draw themselves in a few seconds here; a real board takes an afternoon.
Johannes Vermeer, c. 1665, Mauritshuis
Photographer unknown, 1914
NASA, Apollo 8, 1968
Girl with a Pearl Earring — Johannes Vermeer, c. 1665, Mauritshuis · Snowy owl — Photographer unknown, 1914 · Earthrise — NASA, Apollo 8, 1968. All public domain, credited in full on the about page.
What you get
Built by working backwards from the board.
Every number this tool shows you is a physical one: millimetres between nails, metres of thread, hours at the frame. Nothing is decorative.
Nothing is uploaded
Your photo is decoded, solved and rendered on your own device. There is no server in the loop at all.
Solves in seconds
The solver runs in a worker thread, so the preview draws itself while it works and the page never freezes.
Circle, square, heart
Nails are spaced by arc length along whichever outline you pick, so the gaps stay even the whole way round.
Black or CMYK
One black thread for the classic look, or four passes of yellow, cyan, magenta and black for a colour piece.
True-scale PDFs
Vector, not raster. Nail dots are 1.2 mm, every tenth is bold, and the tiles butt edge to edge with crop marks.
Take it off-screen
A printed winding sheet, a large-print one for tired eyes, plain text, or a project file that moves the sequence and your progress to your phone.
No photo needed
Nail templates, printed at true scale.
Pick a shape, a size and a nail count and get a tiled PDF with every dot numbered. Nail 1 at the top, clockwise, every tenth in bold — the same convention the player speaks. Useful even if you never touch the solver.
- Circle, square or heart
Nails spaced by arc length, so the gaps stay even. - 60 to 600 nails
Any count, any board from 10 cm to 1.2 m. - A4 or US Letter
Tiled with crop marks and a page map. - A 10 cm ruler bar
Check the print before you cut anything.
Questions
Before you buy nails.
More depth in the craft guides, including the sources behind every number.
Is it really one single thread?
Yes. One continuous strand runs the whole piece. You tie on at the first nail, then take the thread across the board to the next number, loop it once around that nail, and carry on. The threads are not tied or connected to each other at any point — they simply cross, and the picture comes from where a lot of crossings pile up. If the thread snaps you join it with a small knot and keep going.
I have never done this. Is it hard?
It is easy and it is long. There is no skill to acquire beyond wrapping thread around a nail without pulling too hard; the difficulty is staying in the right place in a list of a few thousand numbers for several hours. That is exactly what the player handles — it reads the next nail out loud and remembers where you stopped.
Is String Art Maker free?
Yes, and there is no account, no watermark and no export limit. The solver, the PDF writer and the player all run inside your browser, so there is no server bill to pass on to you.
Do my photos get uploaded anywhere?
No. The photo is read by the page, processed on your device and never sent anywhere. You can put the browser in aeroplane mode after the page loads and everything still works.
How many nails should I use?
For a 21 in (53 cm) circle, 240 nails gives about 7 mm between nails, which is comfortable to wind. Fewer nails is easier and blockier; more nails resolves finer detail but needs thinner thread. Below about 4.5 mm of spacing the design is really a pen drawing, not string art.
How long does one piece take?
Budget roughly 4.5 to 8.5 seconds per crossing once you have a rhythm. A 2,238 crossing portrait is therefore about 3 to 5 hours of winding, plus an evening of hammering nails and a day for the paint to dry.
How much thread do I need?
A chord this solver picks averages about 0.76 times the board width, so a 21 in board with a couple of thousand crossings comes to roughly a kilometre of thread. Two 1,000 m spools of 100 to 150 dtex sewing thread cover almost any portrait, and the studio gives you the exact figure once it has solved your photo.
Can I use a colour photo?
Yes. Black thread is the classic look and reproduces tone best. There is also a CMYK mode that splits the image into yellow, cyan, magenta and black windings, done in that order. It is four separate passes, so budget two to three times the thread and the hours. It rewards saturated subjects with big blocks of colour; on a mostly grey scene almost everything lands in the black layer and you have paid for three threads you barely see.
Which photos work best?
Front lit faces on a plain background, one clear subject, and real contrast between light and dark. High-key photos with a dark background are ideal. Busy backgrounds, backlighting, sunglasses and hats all fight the medium.