Photo2PatternFree kandi pattern maker
A kandi pattern maker that knows the rows are offset
Drop a picture and this charts it onto a kandi cuff at no cost and with no account, on the lattice the beads are really strung in: every second row sits half a bead over, and the last column is strung against the first. It returns the exact bead count for every color, the row-by-row list you string from, and how much elastic to cut, and the picture is decoded in this tab. Beads around comes from a wrist rather than from the artwork, so the cuff crops the picture instead of the picture sizing the cuff.
- 100% free
- No signup
- Offset bead rows
- 12 to 60 around
- Row-by-row list
Press Ctrl+V anywhere on the page to drop in artwork you copied out of a drawing app — no need to click the field first.
This is a wrist measurement, not a picture size: 30 × 6.0 mm = 180 mm (7.1 in) of ring, before the elastic gives. An even count keeps the positions stacked, once you step up through the first bead at the end of each round.
One row is a single. 6 rows at 9.0 mm is a band 54 mm (2.1 in) up your arm, and the picture is cropped to that shape rather than the cuff being stretched to the picture.
The picture is wrapped all the way round, so its left and right edges meet at the tie-off and only about a third of it faces outward at once.
Rotates the design around the ring by 0 beads without changing a single count. Use it to move the join to the inside of your wrist, where nobody reads it.
2 to 14, chosen from your own picture rather than from a manufacturer’s list, because pony beads are sold as mixed bags and carry no catalog numbers to snap to. Each one is a tub you have to own before you start.
Fills every bead outside the panel, and every bead the picture left transparent — because the cord has to pass through something, so a cuff has no empty positions the way a pegboard does.
Millimeters. A standard pony bead is quoted 9 × 6 mm with a 4 mm hole, and the 6 mm is the dimension the cord runs through, so that is the spacing round your wrist.
Millimeters, and 9 mm is the bead’s own width with nothing assumed for the rows pulling into each other. Measure a cuff you already own and type that number — it is what decides how much the crop squashes your picture.
How to get a cuff pattern that still fits when it is round
Two body measurements, one decision about the picture, and a list you string from.
Size the cuff before you look at the picture
Beads around comes off a tape measure, not off the artwork: a wrist divided by 6 mm, which puts a 175 mm wrist at 29 beads and most people at 30. Rows are the second body measurement — how far up the arm you want the band to sit, at 9 mm a row — and the picture is then cropped to whatever rectangle those two numbers describe. That is the opposite of a pegboard chart, where the picture picks the width and the boards follow.
Decide how much of the ring the picture gets
Wrapping artwork the whole way round sounds generous and rarely is, because a ring only shows about a third of itself to anyone looking at your arm. Pull the panel in to the beads that face outward, pick which of your colors fills the rest, and then turn the cuff until the join and the plain backing sit on the inside of your wrist. Turning changes nothing in the counts — it only moves where the tie-off lands.
String from the row list rather than from the picture
Copy the row-by-row list and work down it: each line is one round from the tie-off, with identical beads collapsed into runs, so a row reads as four reaches into two tubs instead of thirty separate lookups. Rows are labeled as in line with row 1 or half a bead over, which is the only thing you have to keep straight while your hands are full. The printed sheet carries the same chart with a mark inside every bead for working in daylight away from a screen.
Technical specifications
| Bead lattice | Offset by half a bead: rows 1, 3 and 5 occupy one set of positions and rows 2, 4 and 6 the gaps between them, because each bead is strung between two of the row below |
|---|---|
| Ring size | 12 to 60 beads around and 1 to 24 rows, so 1,440 beads at the largest. The last column is strung against the first, and the chart marks that join at both edges |
| How the picture is read | On a half-bead grid twice the panel width, so an offset row is averaged from its own positions instead of borrowing the row above. On a full wrap, the last half-column of an offset row wraps to the first |
| Bead assumed | Pony bead, quoted 9 × 6 mm with a 4 mm hole. 6.0 mm along the cord and 9.0 mm up the cuff by default — both editable, and the crop follows whatever you type |
| Where the colors come from | 2 to 14, median-cut from your own picture in Oklab. No manufacturer codes: pony beads ship as mixed assortments and no public per-color catalog exists to snap to |
| Backing rule | Every position on the ring carries a bead. Columns outside the picture panel, and any cell more than half transparent, take the backing color rather than being left empty |
| How close the snap landed | Mean and worst Oklab distance between each cell average and the bead it became, printed against 0.02 — the distance this site calls a very close match |
| What comes off the page | The row-by-row list to copy or save as TXT, a PNG of the unrolled ring, the bead list as CSV, and a single print sheet — 60 beads never needs a second page |
Frequently asked questions
Why does a pattern drawn on square graph paper come out wrong on a cuff?
Because half the rows are strung half a bead to the side of the other half. Each new bead goes on the cord between two beads of the row below it, so rows 1, 3 and 5 share one set of positions and rows 2, 4 and 6 share the other. A vertical stripe survives that, since it only has to alternate between two positions. A diagonal does not: the step from one row to the next is half a bead longer one way and half a bead shorter the other, so it arrives as a staircase with a limp. Lettering is the worst case, because the stem of a capital that was one column wide on paper zigzags half a bead every row and stops reading as a stem at all.
How many beads go around my wrist?
Circumference in millimeters divided by 6, because 6 mm is the dimension of a pony bead the cord runs through — the 9 mm in the usual 9 × 6 mm listing is the width across the barrel, which is what sets the row spacing instead. A 175 mm wrist is therefore 29 beads and a 150 mm one is 25. Measure the wrist rather than the hand: elastic cord is what gets the finished ring over your knuckles, so the ring itself is built to the smaller measurement, and how much give it has depends on the cord you bought rather than on anything this page can calculate.
Does it matter whether the number of beads around is odd or even?
It changes how the round ends, and therefore whether the chart is telling you the truth. With an even count you step up through the first bead of the round to begin the next one, and the positions stay stacked exactly as they are drawn here. With an odd count the thread runs on without a step-up and the work spirals, so what the chart shows as a stacked pair of positions walks around the cuff instead, and any design with a vertical edge in it comes out leaning. Odd counts are not blocked above — the field says which one you have chosen as you move it — but they belong to stripes and texture rather than to a picture.
Can I put a photograph of a face on a cuff?
Practically never, and the page prints the number that says so rather than making you find out in beads. A 30-bead ring six rows deep is 180 beads, of which roughly 60 face outward at any angle — about the pixel budget of a small icon, spread over a curved surface, in eight opaque plastic colors that were never mixed to be skin. The average Oklab distance under the chart is the measurement: this site treats 0.02 as a very close match, and a photograph routinely lands three to five times that. Flat artwork with hard edges — a logo, a heart, a word, a checkerboard — lands close and is what kandi has always been made of.
Where does the join go, and why is there one at all?
At the tie-off, and there is one because a cuff is a closed ring rather than a rectangle. The chart is the ring unrolled, so the heavy rule at the left edge and the heavy rule at the right edge are the same place seen from both sides — the last column is strung against the first. Every other row also shows half a bead hanging past the right-hand rule, which is the bead that straddles that join. Turn the cuff until the join sits on the inside of your wrist, or pull the picture panel in so the join falls in plain backing beads where a discontinuity is invisible.
Why is there no Perler or Hama code beside each color?
Because those are fuse beads and a kandi cuff is not made of them. Fuse beads are 5 mm discs ironed flat on a pegboard and carry a per-color part number you can reorder; pony beads are 9 mm barrels strung on elastic and are sold as rainbow, pastel and glow assortments with no public per-color catalog. Printing an invented code would be worse than printing none, so each color is numbered, given a swatch, a printable mark and its hex, and the substitution — holding that swatch against the tubs you own — is the step left to you deliberately.
How much elastic cord should I cut?
About two passes of cord through every bead, plus a hand's length for the knot: 180 beads at 6 mm and two passes is 2.2 meters before the tie allowance. Each bead is entered once when you string it and once more when the row above anchors to it, which is where the factor of two comes from; the base round and the final round differ from that, which is why both the pass count and the knot allowance are fields you can argue with rather than constants. Cut long. Elastic cannot be joined mid-row without leaving a knot inside a bead hole, and running out at row five of six means restringing everything above it.
About the offset lattice, and why a square chart does not survive it
A kandi cuff is not a grid with beads in it. Each bead of a new row is strung on the cord between two beads of the row below, which puts it half a bead to the side, so the fabric is a brick wall rather than a checkerboard: rows 1, 3 and 5 share one set of positions and rows 2, 4 and 6 share the other. Everything follows from that. A column is only a column every second row, a diagonal alternates its step on every row it crosses, and a one-bead-wide vertical stem — the thing every letter is made of — zigzags itself apart. This is the single reason a design that looked right on graph paper comes off the cord looking drunk, and it is why the picture here is sampled at the bead positions of each row separately rather than resampled once onto squares and shifted afterwards. The neighboring pages on this site do use square lattices, and they are right to: a pegboard is a true square array, so a fuse bead chart transfers peg for peg, and warp threads hold beads in square columns, so a loom chart does too. Kandi is the odd one out in that section, and half the patterns circulating for it were drawn on the wrong paper.
The second thing that separates this from a flat chart is that the piece is a ring, and a ring is sized by a body. Beads around is a wrist circumference divided by 6 mm — the dimension a pony bead is drilled through, not the 9 mm across its barrel, which is what sets the spacing between rows instead. Those two numbers being different is why the crop here is not square: a bead covers 6 mm horizontally and 9 mm vertically, so a picture dropped straight onto the grid would come out half again too tall, and the tool takes a center crop at the cuff's real proportions before it starts. That mismatch between the two axes of a cell is the same problem a knitting chart has, where a stitch is wider than it is tall, and a crochet graph handles in its own proportions — different craft, identical arithmetic. Being a ring also means the design has a join, and that only about a third of it faces anyone at a time, which is the honest argument for a picture panel narrower than the cuff with plain backing behind it.
What most kandi generators get wrong, beyond the grid, is the shopping. They return a picture and leave you to count beads off the screen, when the count is the entire point: a bead is a physical object you buy in a tub, and a color used eleven times still costs a tub. Every count in the key here is exact and they add to the whole ring, because a strung row has no empty positions — the cord has to pass through something, so a transparent pixel becomes a backing bead rather than a hole, which is the opposite of how a pegboard treats one. If you want that count priced in whole bags rather than beads, the bead count calculator takes a color list and does the rounding per color. And if the thing you actually want round your wrist is a word rather than a picture, expect to give it five rows: a legible capital needs about five beads of height and four of width on an offset lattice, which is a tighter budget than it sounds and the same trade-off worked in the other direction by the ASCII art generator, where the grid is fixed and the marks are characters.
Product and company names shown here are the trademarks of their respective owners. Photo2Pattern is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by any of them.
What happens to the artwork you drop here
Your picture is opened by JavaScript running in the tab you are reading this in. It is never uploaded, never sent to a server and never stored anywhere — there is no upload step to undo, because there is no upload. Close the tab and nothing of it remains.
The wrist measurement, the bead pitches you type and the colors the tool picked out of your picture are held in this tab only and are gone when it closes — download the row list, the CSV or the PNG before you close it, or the cuff goes with the tab.