Bead loom pattern generator that counts your warps

Sixteen — one more than the beads across, every time. Each bead sits in the lane between two warp threads, so a row of fifteen needs a thread outside the fifteenth as well as one between each pair. The usual variation is to double the outermost thread on each edge, which puts eighteen threads through those same sixteen lanes and keeps a selvedge from fraying where it rubs; it changes neither the bead count nor the width. Warping to the bead count instead of the bead count plus one leaves the last bead with nothing to sit against, and that only becomes visible on the first row.

Because a loom bead is not square: it lies with its hole running sideways along the weft, so it takes its hole length across a row and its outside diameter down the loom. A Delica 11/0 is 1.3 mm one way and 1.6 mm the other, so a hundred rows of a hundred-bead chart weave 130 mm wide by 160 mm long — a square picture coming out 23% longer than it should be. This page counts rows for the bead instead, multiplying the square-cell row count by 1.3 divided by 1.6. That removes about one row in five, and the band returns to the shape of the photograph.

The woven length plus the waste at both ends, which this page prefills at 254 mm and lets you change. Warp waste is not slack: it is the thread that ties to the near beam, reaches the far one, and leaves tails long enough to needle back through the finished rows or to knot into a clasp. It is also the one figure here that depends on your loom rather than on your beads — a short wire-frame loom and a wooden one with rollers want different numbers — so measure the distance between your own beams once and it stops being a guess.

No, and a loom already warped cannot be widened, because every thread is tied at both beams. That is why the weaving width is a field on this page and why going past it is flagged before you print rather than after: 21 Delica 11/0 beads is 27 mm of band, 60 of them is 78 mm, and the wire-frame looms sold to beginners run out at about 76. If the picture genuinely needs the width, the honest options are a wider loom or two bands joined down the selvedge, and the join shows.

The end does not matter and the direction does. Both ends of a band are alike to a loom, so starting at the top or the bottom of the chart only decides which part of the picture meets the clasp. Reading direction is another thing entirely, because a loom is never turned — the weft goes across under the warps and comes back through the same row, so every row is picked up the same way round. Read a list left to right while threading right to left and the whole design is mirrored, and nothing reveals it until the piece is cut off the loom.

Because no sourced Miyuki or Toho color table ships with this site, and a guessed DB number reads exactly like a sourced one on an order form. What the key gives instead is the hex, a printable mark and the exact bead count, and the catalog number stays with your supplier's shade card — which is where it belongs anyway, since a matte, a silver-lined and a galvanized bead can share a shade and photograph as three different colors. Fuse beads are the opposite case: those brands publish codes, so the perler bead pattern page snaps to seven real bead catalogs.

They are given a background bead you choose rather than left as gaps. Every other chart page here can leave a cell empty — a pegboard peg simply stays bare — but a loom row is structural: the beads are what hold the warps apart and carry the weft's tension, so one missing bead partway along a row lets two warps close up and the band puckers there permanently. The color you pick joins the key as its own line with its own count, because it is a tube you have to buy like any other.