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The guide

Drawing a bead pattern

Tools, palette, catalog, motifs and exports in the bead pattern editor.

The editor screen

Three areas, and they never move. The palette on the left, with the project colors and the way into the catalog. The pattern in the middle, where everything is drawn. The toolbar on top, split in two halves: what touches the beads on the left, what touches the view on the right.

The left half. The six tools, history, what acts on a selected block, then motifs, image, resize, export and clear.
The right half. Nothing in it changes the pattern.

That split is the key to finding your way. A button from the left half changes the pattern and can be undone. A button from the right half only changes what you are looking at.

Moving around the pattern

The wheel zooms around the pointer. The hand tool moves the view, but you rarely need to reach for it: the middle click, or a two finger click on a trackpad, pans the view whatever tool is active. That is what keeps you from losing a stroke to go and click in the toolbar.

Three buttons round out navigation: the two magnifiers, the quarter turn rotation, and Fit to screen, which brings the whole pattern back into the window.

Rotation turns the paper, not the weave. It changes your point of view so you can draw comfortably; it changes neither rows nor columns. A badge stays on top of the pattern until it is back to zero, because a printed chart that does not match the screen takes a long time to figure out.

At 100%, beads are shown at their real size.

The drawing tools

  • Brush : lays down the active color. The stroke follows the mouse even when your hand moves fast.
  • Eraser : removes the bead. An empty cell is not a white cell, it is a cell with no bead.
  • Eyedropper : picks the color under the pointer and switches back to the brush. On an empty cell it switches to the eraser, which is the honest translation of “no bead here”.
  • Fill : the paint bucket, stopping at the edges of the drawing. It knows the stitch, so on an offset stitch it spreads to the six neighbouring beads, not just four.
  • Replace a color : click one bead, and every bead of that color takes the active color. It is the paint bucket without the contiguity, handy when a blue no longer works for you.
  • Selection : frames a block of beads to copy it, flip it or set it aside. It lays down nothing itself.

All of it can be undone, including “Clear all”, which counts as a single step.

The palette and the catalog

The project palette holds the colors you use. The Catalog button opens the full chart for the catalog picked at creation, with its search: “matte pink” finds matte pink Delicas, and a reference can be searched with or without separators.

The left panel. The catalog button is the only way into the thousands of references; below it, the favorites, then the colors already in the project.

The catalog puts nothing on the pattern. It is there to tick favorites, which then show at the top of the palette, and that is where you work from. A color only joins the project palette when you actually lay a bead with it, never when you tick it: without that rule, trying fifty colors would leave fifty of them in the project, and in the shopping list.

The Manage button, next to the favorites heading, turns the swatches into remove buttons for a bit of tidying. Removing a favorite does not touch the pattern: beads already laid stay put.

A project palette can only grow. A color that has been used stays in it, even when no bead carries it any more, because the pattern cells point at palette entries by position. That is what makes copy-paste and motifs reliable, and it only shows in the count, where it appears at zero.

Select, copy, flip

The selection tool drags a rectangle in cells. Its two handles can be grabbed again to adjust it, and dragging from the inside moves the frame without moving the beads.

Copy, cut and paste use the usual shortcuts. Pasting is not immediate: the block follows the pointer, translucent, and you click to drop it, so you can aim and try again. Escape gives up on it. Once dropped, the block becomes the selection, so you can flip it straight away without reselecting.

Both mirrors act on the selection, or on the whole pattern when nothing is selected.

On an offset stitch, brick or peyote, the exact reflection does not exist: the mirrored weave is the one whose other every-second row shifts, which no rearrangement of the same cells can reproduce. So the mirror is right to within half a bead, the very offset the stitch imposes on any symmetry anyway.

The motif library

A selection can be set aside for use in other projects: that is the motif library, which lives outside projects and survives their deletion. A chevron band is worth keeping across the dozen bracelets it will appear in.

A motif carries its own colors. It can therefore be inserted into a project from another catalog, and its references then enter that project’s palette, and its shopping list: the row says so when the catalogs differ. Motifs have no name, you recognise them by their thumbnail.

Starting from an image

The From an image button turns a photo into beads. The image is reduced to the grid, then each cell gets the nearest bead in your catalog. Two settings: the number of colors, to move back and forth until the result suits you, and the framing, which either fills the pattern by cropping or fits the whole image in and leaves the edges bare.

Nothing goes over the network, and there is no AI involved: it is pixel averaging and a nearest-color lookup. The result arrives as an armed paste, which you place with one click and undo with Mod+Z.

A bright but very minor color, a sun, an eye, melts into the average when the color count is low. It comes back as you raise the slider: that is what the slider is for.

Resizing the grid

The Resize button changes the number of rows and columns after the fact. The drawing does not move, the frame moves around it, hence the anchor to choose: adding ten columns does not mean the same thing on the left, on the right, or five on each side.

Whatever falls outside is dropped, and the number of beads lost is announced before you confirm. The operation undoes like everything else.

Display settings

The Display button opens four settings. Bead spacing and grid are preferences: they apply to all your projects. Emphasised lines, on the other hand, belong to the pattern: they are how this one is counted, a darker line every N cells, set separately for X and Y.

The 3D preview shows the work in volume, flat, as a bracelet or as a flag. It is a simulated view, meant for judging how the colors work together.

Counting and exporting

The Beads used panel, at the bottom right of the pattern, unfolds into the list of colors by decreasing count, manufacturer reference included. That is the shopping list, and it exports to CSV for a spreadsheet.

The PNG export outputs the whole pattern, upright, with or without the grid. Neither zoom, nor panning, nor rotation make it into the file: it is the pattern, not a screenshot.

Shortcuts

Key Effect
B E I G brush, eraser, eyedropper, fill
S H selection, hand
R 0 + - rotate, fit to screen, zoom
P 3D preview
Mod+Z / Mod+Shift+Z undo, redo
Mod+C Mod+X Mod+V copy, cut, paste
Del clear the selected block
Esc drop a pending paste, then the selection

Mod is Command on a Mac, Control elsewhere. The mirrors and “Clear all” deliberately have no shortcut.