Turn a Photo into a
Peyote or Loom Chart

Bead weaving is pixel art at about 1.3 millimetres per pixel. A cuff bracelet is commonly 10 to 20 beads wide and 130 to 180 rows long; a wide band or a small woven tapestry might be 40 beads across. Those numbers decide everything about which photos work. A face at 15 beads wide has three or four beads for an eye, which is enough for a stylised symbol and not enough for a portrait. Bold silhouettes, geometric and southwestern motifs, flowers, animals in profile, flags, and lettering all convert cleanly.

Palette discipline matters more here than in almost any other grid craft, because every extra color is another tube to buy, another cup on the table, and another chance to pick up the wrong bead in a row of thirty. Eight to fifteen Delica colors is the practical range for a photo-derived design. Dithering is worth avoiding too: a checkerboard of two shades that reads as a blend on screen reads as a checkerboard at 1.3mm, and it doubles the number of color changes per row.

The other planning decision is length, not width. Beadwork grows one row at a time, and a row is about 1.6mm, so a 175-row cuff is roughly 28cm before the clasp. Set the chart's width to the width you want the finished piece to be, and let the length follow the photo — the generator quotes the finished centimetres for the bead size you picked, so you can check a bracelet is a bracelet before you warp anything.

Loom weaving and square stitch produce the same fabric: beads in straight columns and straight rows, a plain rectangle. On a loom, warp threads run the length of the piece, the weft carries each row of beads under the warps, and a second pass back through the same row above the warps locks them in. Square stitch builds the identical grid off-loom by stitching each bead to the one below it. Either way the chart is an ordinary grid, which is why loom and square stitch share one option here.

Peyote stitch is the offset one. You add a bead, skip a bead, and each new bead settles into the gap between two beads of the previous row — so the beads interlock like bricks and alternating columns end up half a bead lower than their neighbours. That is not a drawing convention, it is where the bead physically is, and a peyote design charted on a square grid comes out distorted when it is beaded. Flat peyote comes in even-count and odd-count versions; even-count is the easier place to start, odd-count needs a turnaround stitch at one edge on every other row and is what you want when a design has a true center column.

Brick stitch is peyote rotated ninety degrees — the same interlock read across rows instead of down columns. A peyote chart can be worked as brick stitch by turning it, but ArtPatt does not yet chart brick stitch directly. Ladder stitch, herringbone and right-angle weave are different fabrics again and are not what this generator produces.

You get both formats. The chart itself is graphical — a grid of colored cells with a legend, the same thing you would draw on bead graph paper. The printable PDF then adds a written word chart for peyote: rows 1–2 strung together as one pass, every later row listed bead by bead in actual stringing order, with the direction marked and a tick box per row. Loom charts get plain row-by-row run counts the same way.