A bead count calculator that counts bags too

Because beads are not interchangeable between colors and bags are sold by color. A thousand beads is one purchase only when all thousand are the same shade; spread over twenty-three shades it is twenty-three purchases, since you cannot buy four-fifths of a bag of gray. That makes the number of colors, not the number of beads, the thing that sets the bill — twenty-three colors cannot come to fewer than twenty-three bags however small the design is. It is why a modest design in many shades outspends a large one in few.

No, and this is the commonest way people underbuy. A mixed tub, bucket or jar states its total across every color inside it, so a 1,000-bead assortment of thirty shades holds roughly thirty of each — nowhere near a bag of any one of them. The bag field wants the count of a single-color pack, which is what you will be reordering from once the tub runs out of the one shade your design leans on. If you only own mixed tubs, work out how many of them your worst color needs and expect a lot of surplus in the other twenty-nine.

Three percent covers ordinary adult loss — beads dropped, placed and pulled again, or fused into a corner that got binned. Push it to ten or fifteen when a child under six is doing the placing, because at that age a meaningful share of the bag ends up on the floor, in the sofa or briefly in a mouth. Push it up again for anything worked on a lap or a rug rather than a table. It is deliberately a field rather than a constant: the honest figure depends on who is placing the beads and on what surface, and nobody can measure that from here.

Somewhere between 40 and 70 percent for most silhouettes, and lower than you expect. A rectangle full of picture fills every peg; a character on a transparent background is mostly empty rectangle, and only the pegs carrying a bead cost anything. The quickest honest way to get the number is to chart the design first and read the filled count off the key, because a guess here scales the entire result. Where a chart already exists, use the pasted-list route instead and the coverage question disappears — the list only contains beads that are actually placed.

Decide whether it earns a whole bag, because that is what it costs. Twelve beads and eleven hundred beads are the same purchase, so a shade used for one eye highlight is priced identically to the background. Three ways out: merge it into its nearest neighbor and lose the detail, buy a mixed assortment and pick out the dozen you need, or keep it because it is the shade that makes the piece work. What matters is that the decision is made deliberately rather than discovered on the receipt, which is what the leftover column is for.

No — the count is set by the pegs, not by their size, so the same design needs the same number of beads at every diameter. What changes is the piece: a 100 by 100 design measures 260 mm across in 2.6 mm beads, 500 mm in 5 mm beads and a full meter in 10 mm ones, a factor of nearly four for identical work and identical counts. That is the useful lever when a design is the right shape and the wrong size, and it is the reason a pattern should be planned in pegs first and converted to millimeters afterward.

Yes, as long as each line ends with the count. The parser removes hex values first, then takes the last whole number on the line, which means a color code keeps its digits — the zero in a code like P01 has no word boundary in front of it and is never mistaken for a quantity — and a trailing percentage is ignored because it carries a decimal point. Thousands separators are handled, so a block copied out of a rendered table works as well as raw CSV. Anything it cannot read is listed back to you with its line number instead of being silently dropped.