Last week, I walked us through how to use our pillow blank for your own design.

Today, I want to share 5 indispensable resources to help you with designing your own latch hook pillow (or rug, or wall hanging). These tools will help you pick out colors, create a chart to follow or inspire you with vintage designs. Read on to learn more!

This color-picker website can help you become more comfortable with putting together a color palette for your designs.

You can start by browsing trending palettes, or dive into putting one together on your own. There are tons of features available, including extracting a palette from an existing image, quickly accessing different shades of a selected color, or shifting the hue or saturation of your palette all at once.

The Lospec Editor is a free web-based pixel art creator and editor, and is great for creating charted designs for your latch hook. One pixel = one mesh square on the canvas. 

This in-browser editor has all the basic tools you need to create a precise chart for a latch hook design like an eraser, line, fill, etc. In addition, you can save and reload previous projects within the browser and select different premade palettes from Lospec.

Aseperite is an excellent standalone pixel art program I use for putting together precise charts for a latch hook design.

This program has more features than are available in the Lospec web app, including layers, inserting text, and a “pixel perfect” option that ensures your lines are smooth.

The number one source for latch hook information, including a huge, HUGE quantity of old latch hooking catalogs that gives you an inspiring peek into the golden age of latch hooking. 

This site is exhaustive, with loads of information on the history of latch hooking, tools used, and tips for working your rug. I visit it very frequently! 

Upload any image to this website and it will convert it to a latch hook chart.

Sometimes the options need to be fiddled with to get the best result, but this is an excellent place to start if you want to tackle a big, complicated design based on a photograph or other detailed source material.

There you have it, five excellent resources to assist you in designing your own latch hook rug, pillow or wall hanging.

One of the best ways to get started is to… get started! If you are feeling stuck, what if you try finding an inspiring motif in a vintage catalog on Latch Hook Heaven, sketching it out in Lospec’s Editor and selecting colors for it using the Coolors site? Once you familiarize yourself with these tools, it will be easier to bring your unique ideas to completion.

Have fun!