A little foray into peyote stitch beading

One of my favourite genres of souvenir is craft projects I can take home. I maaaay have pushed this a little far with everything I started in Laos a few years ago, but I am undeterred. This spring in Toulouse, left unsupervised in the city center, I went to Fifi Jolipois and picked up a kit for a craft I find fascinating: peyote stitch beading. Then, I spent a rainy Sunday afternoon following the instructions, which was just as satisfying as expected. And the resulting fabric is so very fun to touch. Once again a piece of jewelry becomes a fidget toy... (another favourite is one that has a little tassel of chains at the end). I did the assorted earrings on a subsequent weeknight; they were pretty quick to put together, especially since I figured out a trick to make the first few rows easier. Today, I assembled all the bits into a necklace, but the earrings are supposed to be assembled with glue, and I don't have any jewelry glue. I'll have to figure out if generic cyanoacrylate can work, or if I need to come up with another assembly method.

Now comes the dangerous bit.

I have a bunch of beads left over.

Oh no.

Designing a matching bracelet

First of all, let's count the remaining beads. I take the bead containers one by one and dump them into a larger box. Then, I use the beading needle provided with the kit to pick them up in groups of ten and move them back into the container, keeping a tally every time I repeat the operation. (Personally, I can't think of a better thing to do on a Sunday afternoon.)

Verdict: 

Black	76
Copper	34
Blue	192
Cream	192
Grey	151
Total	645

Next, the gauge. The pendant is 27 beads wide, or 36mm. The vertical sides are made of 11 beads, coming out at 19mm. My wrist measurement is about 15cm and I think half a centimeter of ease will be enough. To make my life easier, I'll probably make it a rectangle shape and buy a clasp, which this tutorial suggests will add somewhere between 2.5 and 3cm. Let's say, then, that I will weave a 12cm long band. That's about 69 beads high. Since I counted 645 beads in total, I can make the bracelet 9 beads wide, just a little more than the earrings, coming out to 12mm wide.

Finally, pattern creation. Stitchfiddle isn't suited for this, since it can only handle patterns where everything is aligned, unlike the half-drop of peyote stitch. This is a one-time thing, so I'm looking for something free. That narrows it down immediately to two candidates: peyoteapp.com and Planbead. Trying to make an account in the first only gets me an error message, which leaves me with the second. That one lets me create an account; victory! 

Now, to determine the proportions of the colours. I'm going to have to do some additional math here. The copper-coloured beads are the ones I have the fewest of, and they're in an awkward number, since 34 is only divisible by 17. But that's close enough to 32, which is a multiple of 8. If I take the nearest lower multiple of eight for each colour:

Colour	Actual number	Nearest multiple of 8	Ratio
Black	76	72	9
Copper	34	32	4
Blue	192	192	24
Cream	192	192	24
Grey	151	144	18
Total	645	632	79

 The rightmost column gives me the proportions in which I can use the beads. It's time to experiment. (I hate this part.)

I'm not having much luck with trying to create a repeating pattern, especially when trying to think about how the repeats will connect with each other. That's how I landed on diagonal stripes; then there's no need to think too hard about odd and even rows. I did get two results that worked with the multiples I calculated, but I'm not too enthusiastic about either of them. Especially after extending the pattern to see what it looks like with more repeats.

The "asymmetric triangles" pattern looked okay as a single repeat, but I'm really not crazy about the white stripes in the complete version. The striped one is not bad, but it really doesn't make the most of the colours and is likely quite error-prone.

I did notice that trying to make a pattern out of my minimal repeat was really tricky. That's how asymmetric triangles extended came to be: I figured I'd have better luck if I took double the number of beads for a single repeat. But I can push the idea further and make a completely non-repeating pattern, which will be a little harder to bead because it will require more attention to the pattern, but allows for more flexibility. To help me stay roughly on track with the numbers, I made a spreadsheet with all the multiples of the ratios I calculated in the previous table: 

After that, I'm just vibing, periodically checking that I'm on track. I started in the middle with a big ol' diamond shape and just added more diamonds and triangles, separated by the blue colour. The result: 

I got pretty close to the bead numbers! If I find I made a counting mistake, I'll fudge the end of the design somehow. The ends will be covered by clasps anyway.

From the middle, I went down then up. Looking at it, it's pretty clear that those were two separate design processes. I made a lot more small shapes in the lower half and larger ones in the top half, which I prefer. Am I going to start over? Probably not.

Now, to bead. I made pretty short work of it; it's a great pairing for an audiobook. Now of course, there's the problem of finding a matching clasp. I suspect a trip to the craft shop is in my near future.

To be continued...