~ PRODUCT UPDATES ~
What's New at MakeBead
We ship improvements all the time — almost always free, and usually because someone asked. Here's what just landed, and what you can do with it.
September 2026
My Colors like your bead tray, a palette that stays open, and symbols you can read
Under My Colors → Edit, choose how many colours make a row — as many as your bead tray has — and the swatches line up row for row like the tray, on every device. On a phone or tablet, tap Keep open in the palette: it stays under the canvas while you pick and draw, instead of closing after every colour. With Symbols switched on under View, every swatch, the current colour and the materials list show each colour's symbol, and a colour keeps its symbol while you draw — it used to change as the counts changed, and past 40 colours two colours could share one. Codes on the canvas now fit their bead: a Delica chart shows 724 where DB0724 ran across three beads. The same person who asked to sort and change colours asked for this.
Every Miyuki Delica colour — and the wrong ones fixed
The loom, peyote and brick stitch tools now have the whole Miyuki Delica 11/0 range: over 1,200 colours, each with its DB code, taken from Miyuki's own directory. Each colour is the average of Miyuki's photo of that bead — close, not exact, and metallic, AB and lined beads look different in person. Our old palette had 39 colours with estimated values, and 16 of them showed another bead's colour: DB0724, drawn as red, is green. Saved designs keep the look they had, and the colours in them now carry the DB number of the real bead that looks like that; a colour you renamed in My Colors keeps your name. Discontinued beads are no longer offered, but you can still type their number. Under My Colors → Edit, “Paste codes” now takes a DB number however it is written — DB10, DB010, db-10 or just 10 — and says which ones it could not find. We are sorry for the mix-up.
My Colors: put them in order, and fix a colour afterwards
Open Edit under My Colors in any designer. Drag a colour by its handle, move it with the arrow keys, or sort the whole list by number (DB2 before DB10) or by colour — and undo the sort if it was not what you wanted. Tap a colour's swatch to change it: type the hex, use the colour picker, or, in Chrome and Edge on a computer, pick the colour straight off the screen, from a photo of your beads for example. Every bead of that colour in the open design changes with it and keeps its name and number, and one Undo puts back both. Renaming a colour now reaches the beads already painted, too, so the materials list, the PDF and a saved pattern show the new name. A reader who designs loom bracelets with Miyuki Delica beads asked for this.
A sprite maker that animates
Pixel art now moves. The new sprite maker opens with a strip of frames above the canvas and a preview that plays them: duplicate a frame, change the pixels that move, and the previous frame shows faintly underneath so each step lines up with the last (onion skin). Set the speed from 1 to 24 frames per second, then download a looping GIF at up to 8× or a sprite sheet PNG that Godot, Unity or GameMaker can slice by frame size. Up to 32 frames, transparent backgrounds, and every frame is saved with the sprite. The pixel art editor has the same frames behind its new Frames button. Animated patterns now play in the gallery as well, on their cards and on their page, where a GIF of them can be downloaded; the frame strip can add any of your saved patterns as frames; and four animated templates from us are on the sprite maker page to start from.
A peyote stitch designer, and word charts that bead up right
Peyote has a designer of its own. Draw on a chart whose columns sit half a bead apart, in Miyuki Delica colours, and the word chart sits beside it and writes itself as you draw: rows 1&2 strung, then every row with its bead count and DB codes in pick-up order. Point at a bead and its row lights up, with which bead of the row it is; click a row and the chart outlines it. Under the chart is the band itself: drawn at the true size of the beads, sized by length on a slider marked in inches or centimetres, and with a motif repeated to length in one click, the seams marked on the chart. The PDF prints the numbered chart and the word chart with a box to tick on every row. While building it we found that the converter's peyote word chart put row 3 onward on the wrong set of columns, so each bead landed one column over from the chart, and that charts with an odd number of columns had the wrong columns drawn low. Both are fixed in the converter, the designer, the PDF and the PNG. Loom PDFs also printed the finished size with the bead's width and length swapped; that is fixed too. Any pattern in the gallery, loom patterns included, now opens in the peyote and brick stitch designers, and the brick stitch designer gets the word chart beside its chart too. A reader who designs bead patterns asked for this.
Fringe for brick stitch earrings
The brick stitch designer now charts fringe. Click Fringe on the toolbar and a V of strands, sized from the piece, hangs under every bead of the bottom row: drawn straight, the way fringe hangs, not staggered like the rows above it. The bar under the canvas changes the shape — straight, V, or longer on one side — and the shortest and longest strand as you drag; the colors you painted on the strands stay, a tip bead in a color of your choice moves to the new ends, and Color strands repaints them all at once. The written rows list every strand top to tip after the brick rows, the PDF and PNG draw the strands straight and number their beads, and the materials list counts them. The rows are now numbered from the bottom on the canvas too, as in the written rows and the PDF, and resizing a shaped piece no longer skews it. Someone who designs and sells brick stitch earrings asked for this.
A QR code pattern maker that checks itself
Type a link and get a bead-by-bead or stitch-by-stitch chart of a QR code for Perler beads, mini beads or cross stitch. It keeps the quiet zone, lets you pick the error-correction level and how many beads make one module, names the two colours from the real palette with their contrast ratio, and then scans its own chart the way a phone camera would — as a photo of the ironed piece — and tells you whether it reads. A version chart lists what fits at each size, in beads and pegboards. Open the result in the designer for a printable PDF.
A brick stitch designer, with a bead count for every row
Brick stitch patterns used to open in the pixel-art editor, which squared the rows. They now have a designer of their own: alternate rows sit half a bead over, the palette is Miyuki Delica, and a Rows panel under the canvas reads the piece the way a printed pattern does — the bead count of every row, its DB codes in pick-up order, and each increase and decrease marked. Leave cells empty to shape a triangle or a diamond; the widest row becomes the ladder base and the rows are listed in working order, with the turn. The PDF prints the count beside every row of the chart and the written rows after it, and the PNG does the same. A reader who designs earrings asked for exactly this.
Sharper canvases on high-resolution screens
On Retina and other 2× screens the design canvases were drawn at half the screen's resolution and scaled up, so rounded beads looked soft. The designers, the converter preview, the placement tracker, the bead letter generator, the Minecraft circle generator and the export preview now draw at the screen's own resolution, so every bead edge lands on a real pixel. Downloads are unchanged: a PNG is the same file on every screen.
Show what you made
Every public pattern now has an “I made one” button. Post a photo of your finished piece — beads, stitches, bricks — and it appears on the pattern's page under “Made by the community”, with your name, after a quick review. Your browser shrinks the photo and strips its location data before anything is uploaded, and you can remove it any time. Photos also collect on your profile, and the pattern's designer sees a “new photos” note on My Patterns.
Printable charts, rebuilt from the cover page down
The PDF you download is a different document now. A cover page shows the whole design with a materials list you can tick off as you buy; chart pages carry row and column numbers on all four sides, a heavier line every fifth and tenth bead, and a colour key for just the colours on that page, so you never flip back to find a code. Charts are cut to fit the paper — a 55-stitch design prints as 28 + 27, not 50 + 5 — and pegboard crafts still get one page per board. It prints in your language, including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai and Russian, on A4 or Letter, and everything you switch on in the export dialog — grid, codes, symbols, boards, ruler, colour list, background — is on the page. The PNG export is the same chart at the same standard, so what you preview is what you get.
A tidier designer toolbar
The designer's tools used to fill four rows of buttons before the canvas started — five on a phone. They're two rows now: your drawing tools with undo and redo, then size, reference image, a View menu and full view. Grid, codes, pixels, symbols, boards and mirror moved into View, since they're settings you flip once, and Clear all sits at the foot of that menu where a stray tap can't reach it. On a phone the canvas starts 130 px higher.
Colours within reach on a phone, and the code always in view
On a phone the palette used to sit far below the canvas: pick a colour, scroll down, scroll back. A colour bar now stays at the bottom of the screen while you draw — the brush you're holding, with its code and name, the colours you used last, and a button that opens the whole palette in a sheet; tap a colour and you're back on the canvas. On every screen the panel names the current colour by its code, the search box also takes a hex code (type #FF8800 and use it as a custom colour), and the panel starts higher because an empty My Colors takes one line.
The gallery keeps going as you scroll
No more pressing Next and starting over at the top of the page. Keep scrolling and more patterns load in on their own, all the way to the end of the gallery. Open a pattern and press Back, and you land right where you were, with everything you'd already scrolled past still there. Reload or share the page and it opens at the patterns you were looking at. It works the same in every craft's gallery and on every tag page — and Gallery is now the first item in the menu.
Newest patterns first, and crafts in one dropdown
The gallery now opens on Newest, so a pattern you publish is at the top right away, instead of waiting several pages down for its first likes. Hot and Top are still one tap away. Choosing a craft now happens in a single dropdown next to the search box, so patterns start on your very first screen rather than below rows of craft buttons.
Minecraft skins in HD: 128×128 for Bedrock
A reader asked for the 128×128 size Bedrock accepts, and the skin editor now makes it. Press “128×128 HD” at the top of the editor and every pixel splits into four you can add detail to — sharper eyes, fabric texture, finer shading — or upload a 128×128 skin you already have and it opens in HD. The 3D preview, symmetry, selection and saving to your account all work in HD, and the download is a real 128×128 skin.png. Java Edition only accepts 64×64, so the editor says so, and pressing “64×64” turns your design back into a skin that works in both editions — it asks first if that would merge away detail.
Type any colour as a HEX code
Another reader wanted colours beyond the ready-made swatches, typed in as a code. The skin editor already had a box for that, but it wouldn't take typing — now it does. Type a code like #FF8800 (the # is optional) and the colour switches the moment the code is complete, then waits in “Recent” for next time. A line above the colour picker now says you can do this, so it's no longer a box you have to discover.
Draw backstitch in the cross-stitch designer
A reader asked whether a design could include backstitch, not just full stitches — now it can. Pick “Backstitch” in the designer’s toolbar and drag from hole to hole to outline a motif or write a word; click a line to remove it. Choose 1 or 2 strands, and set the snap to “Half” to reach the middle of a square for fine detail. Lines move, flip and rotate with the stitches you select, and go wherever your pattern goes: saved patterns, share links, and the PNG and PDF, whose key lists every backstitch thread. The converter’s backstitch outline now opens as lines you can edit when you press “Edit Pattern”, and printed charts show every line — even one that runs across two pages.
Your gauge now shapes the knitting chart
Knit stitches are wider than they are tall, so the knitting chart adds rows to match your gauge — but it always worked them out from the default 20 × 28, whatever you typed. A reader set 20 × 20 and still got a stretched chart. It now follows the gauge you enter: equal stitches and rows turn a square photo into a square chart, and the finished piece keeps the picture's proportions at any gauge. Tapestry and mosaic crochet, peyote and brick stitch work the same way now, and the tip under the gauge fields talks about your craft instead of always about crochet.
My Colors holds 500 colours now
Your personal palette used to stop at 60 colours — fewer than the kits it exists for, and two readers wrote in about it. It now holds 500: the whole 489-colour DMC range fits with room to spare, and so does every bead box on the site. Paste your entire kit list in one go, and the palette scrolls instead of pushing everything down the page.
Search right from the gallery
The search box now sits on the gallery pages, right where you're browsing. Narrow the results to one craft with a tap — each craft shows how many matches it has — and searching for just a craft, like “pony” or “perler beads”, takes you straight to that craft's gallery. A search that comes up empty inside one craft now looks across all of them instead of stopping at a blank page, and more than a hundred patterns that search used to miss now turn up.
Saving a Minecraft skin, clear at every step
Three readers told us the save button in the skin editor seemed to do nothing, so every step now answers back. The skin.png download says right under the button that it has started; the account button reads “Sign in to save” in words; on a computer, the sign-in prompt appears right beside it; and when you sign in from the email, your skin is saved in the tab that opens. The spinning 3D preview is sharp on phones now too — another reader noticed it had gone blurry.
Banner letters in your language
The Minecraft banner alphabet now works in all 11 languages, and every loom step uses the exact names your game shows in that language — so what you read on the page is what you click in the loom.
Minecraft circles: every size, plus spheres and domes
The circle generator's size chart now lists every diameter from 5 to 21 blocks, plus the popular bigger ones up to 64, and you can jump straight to any of them. The sphere, dome, cylinder and cone builders were always in the tool; now the page shows them, and each one opens the tool ready to build.
August 2026
Replace one colour everywhere — inside the designer too
Swapping a colour was something only the converter could do. Hit Edit Pattern and the designer opened without it, which is exactly where you want it — a reader wrote in about that. There are two ways now. The toolbar has a Replace All tool: pick the new colour, click any bead of the old one, and every one of them changes. And every row of the Materials list has a swap button that recolours that colour to whatever your brush is holding, telling you both ends before you click. One Ctrl+Z undoes either, and in mirror mode both the front and the back change together. The Minecraft skin editor got the same tool.
Use one of your patterns as your profile picture
Signing in with Google handed us your Google photo, and nothing on the site let you change it — a reader wrote in about exactly that. Settings now lets you use any pattern you've published as your picture, or show no picture at all, and the choice sticks: it isn't overwritten the next time you sign in. Unpublish that pattern later and your picture falls back to your account photo, then comes back if you publish it again. There is deliberately no file upload — a lot of the people here are kids, and starting from your own published work keeps a profile personal without opening an unmoderated image surface.
Mosaic charts can no longer ask for impossible stitches
A crocheter wrote in with a chart that wanted two drop-down dcs at the same stitch on consecutive rows — and that can't be crocheted: the upper dc has no free front loop to anchor into. The generator now snaps every design to the nearest workable chart (a colour area starts on a row of its own colour), the editor shows the X chart live while you flip cells, and a note tells you when a stitch had to give way. If you exported a mosaic pattern before this fix: wherever two X's stack, work the lower one and a plain sc above it.
MARD's 291-colour kit — pastels, and beads that change colour with heat
The 221 covers the everyday range; the 291 adds the 70 specialty colours — the P-series pastels and skin tones, the Q, R, T and Y series, and ZG: beads that change colour with heat. The 240 and 264 boxes are in the set picker now as well. We didn't dare list them while these series had no trustworthy colour values anywhere; they ship now that three independent sources agree on all 70. As always, the codes match what's printed on your bottles.
The DMC chart is now the real one — all 489 colours
An audit found our DMC floss chart held 154 colours, and 142 of them were hand-approximated values rather than DMC's own — and the diamond painting palette turned out to be a byte-for-byte copy of the same wrong chart. Both are fixed: cross stitch now matches against DMC's real range, all 489 colours, and the diamond drills carry the corrected values — so the code a pattern names is the skein you actually buy. There's also a new reference page listing every colour, with a finder that takes any hex value and tells you the closest DMC — and how close it really is.
One yarn weight chart for all the naming systems
The same yarn can be sold as worsted, aran, 10 ply or CYC 4 depending on where you bought it — and half the tables online quietly contradict each other. This chart puts the CYC numbers, US and UK names, AU/NZ ply, hook and needle sizes, knit gauge and wraps per inch side by side, and where the systems genuinely disagree it says so instead of silently picking one. There's a finder too: type whatever you know — worsted, 8 ply, 5.5 mm, 10 wpi — and it tells you which weight you're holding.
Delete your account yourself — with 30 days to change your mind
Deleting your account no longer means emailing us. The button in Settings takes your published patterns and profile page down immediately, and after 30 days everything is permanently erased. The confirmation email carries a cancel link — use it, or the button in Settings, any time inside those 30 days, and your account comes back with exactly the patterns that were public before.
The sign-in email carries a code now, not just a link
A magic link signs in whichever device opens it. Ask for it on your PC and tap it on your phone, and it's the phone that signs in while the PC sits waiting — a reader wrote in about exactly that. The same email now also carries a 6-digit code: type it on the device you actually want to use, and that one signs in. The email itself was redone along the way, and arrives in your own language — any of the 11 the site speaks.
Minecraft map art, shaded the way the game does it
Map art is not a flat floor. Minecraft decides each block's brightness by comparing its height to the block just north of it, which is why real map art is built as a staircase. The new generator solves those heights for you: upload a picture and get the height of every block, a materials list that counts the terrain underneath instead of only the surface, and a map file you can drop into a world to see the finished art before you place anything.
A banner maker that gives you the loom steps
Design a banner layer by layer and get the part other tools leave out — the exact loom sequence that builds it. It also shows the design on a shield, which is genuinely a different picture, and hands you the /give command in the right format for your version. 45 ready-made designs to start from, Java and Bedrock.
Spell a word in Minecraft banners
Minecraft has no letter pattern, so every banner alphabet is a trick of geometry — stripes and a saltire, plus layers dyed the background colour to cut shapes back out. Type a word and get one banner per letter in your own two colours, each with the loom sequence that builds it. A few letters are honest approximations, because a loom applies six layers and S needs seven; those say exactly what they gave up.
83 Minecraft banner designs, each with its loom steps
A picture of a banner tells you nothing about how to build it — and with only six loom layers to spend, guessing wrong costs dye. So every design in the new gallery carries its exact loom sequence: country flags, simple shapes, decorative patterns and themed banners, all buildable, and each one opens in the editor if you want to change the colours.
Crochet hook sizes, converted properly
A chart that converts between US letters, metric millimetres, UK numbers and Japanese sizes. Steel hooks get a table of their own because their numbering genuinely runs backwards from everything else — and where two standards disagree, the page says so rather than quietly picking one.
July 2026
A Minecraft skin editor — draw on the character, not the texture map
Skin editors usually hand you the raw 64×64 texture, where a head is six separate squares and nothing sits where you expect. Here you paint straight onto the character — front, back, or limb by limb — while a 3D preview spins every change. Classic and slim models, starter characters to remix, and the export is a game-ready PNG for Java and Bedrock. And the part no other skin editor does: one click opens your character as a Perler bead chart you can actually build.
Selections move, flip, rotate and delete now
The select tool could copy and paste, and that was all of it. Now you can drag the selected block (or nudge it with the arrow keys), flip it, rotate it 90° and delete it — and it works the same in the designer, the converter's pattern editor and the skin editor. Pushing a block past the canvas edge mid-move loses nothing until you drop it, and even then one undo brings it back. Leaving a selection stopped being a puzzle too: Escape works, but so does a plain click, or simply switching tools.
My Patterns shows what arrived while you were away
Likes and favourites used to land silently — unless you memorised your counters, someone enjoying your work looked exactly like nothing. Every pattern in My Patterns now carries a small badge with what's new since your last visit, and a strip above the grid sums it up and names the patterns that got the attention. Reloading the page — or coming back from opening one pattern — doesn't wipe the badges mid-read. And there's deliberately no notification bell: the news waits where your patterns already are.
A designer page for bead loom patterns
The bead loom converter has always turned a photo into a chart — but drawing an original band from scratch meant borrowing the perler designer, which rendered round pegboard beads instead of loom cylinders. The loom now has a designer of its own: a blank warp-and-weft canvas with the Miyuki Delica palette, DB codes on hover, and a PDF export that counts beads per colour. Find it under Designers, or from the DESIGNER pill on the loom converter.
Edit or unpublish a published pattern
Publishing used to be one-way: the moment a pattern went public, its title, description and tags were frozen, and the only way out of the gallery was deleting it. A reader wrote in about exactly this, so both are fixed — every public pattern in My Patterns now has a button to edit its listing and one to unpublish it. The pattern and its likes stay safely private, ready to republish anytime, and if you retitle it the old link quietly forwards to the new one.
Tell us which bead set you bought
A materials list naming beads that were never in your box is worse than no list at all. MARD is sold as numbered sets, so the sidebar now asks which one you own — anything from the 24 up to the 216 — and the pattern is built only from the colours in that box. The contents come from the manufacturer’s own set charts, not from guesswork.
MARD's 221-colour kit — and a page of its own
MARD arrived in May with the 185-colour kit. Someone wrote in asking for the 221, so it is here: 36 more colours — D26, F25, H5–H23 and the M series, mostly the greys, taupes and muted skin tones the smaller kit cannot reach. Both kits sit in the brand switcher with the A1 / B5 codes printed on your bottles, and MARD has its own page now.
Work one colour at a time
Nobody places a pattern in reading order — you open one bag, place every bead of that shade, then open the next. The progress tracker now lists every colour with how many are LEFT, and tapping one pushes every other colour into the background so the beads you are hunting for are the only ones at full strength. “Mark all placed” finishes the whole bag in one tap.
Track your build in the designer too
“Start Crafting” used to exist only after converting a photo. A pattern you drew by hand poses exactly the same bead-by-bead problem, so the designer has it now — click beads off as you place them, drag to paint a run, and your progress is kept in the browser.
See symbols, codes and board seams while you design
The designer already put chart symbols and pegboard seams into your exported PDF, but never on screen. Both are toggles on the canvas now, along with a new Pixels view that flattens round beads to plain squares — easier to count edges against a real board, and available in the converter and the tracker as well.
Edit Pattern opens the real designer
Editing a converted pattern used to drop you into a cut-down editor with no select, resize, mirror or reference image. It hands the grid to the full designer now. The tool also remembers the bead brand and the display toggles you chose, so they are set the way you left them next time.
Eight new craft chart tools
MakeBead now charts far more than beads: crochet graphs (graphgan & C2C), filet crochet with the foundation-chain math worked out for you, tapestry crochet with in-the-round instructions for mochila bags, overlay mosaic with a derived X chart, knitting charts in true stitch proportions, alpha friendship bracelets, and real staggered peyote & brick stitch for Miyuki Delica beads. Every tool turns any photo into a chart, writes row-by-row instructions, and exports a printable PDF — free.
See your photo through the pattern
The “Compare original” tool now has a second slider that fades the pattern itself — not just the photo underneath. Slide it down and your beads turn translucent, so the original photo shows straight through and you can check every color against it.
June 2026
Your own palette — “My Colors”
Pick any color, or paste a whole list of codes, and save it to a personal palette that follows you into every design. Sign in and it syncs across all your devices.
Convert a photo using only your colors
On the image converter, choose “All my colors” and your pattern is built only from beads you actually own — no more buying colors you'll never use.
Print-ready exports: color list + ruler
Export your design as a PNG with a full color and bead-count list, plus optional ruler numbers around the grid so you never lose your place while placing beads.
Save once, open anywhere
Save a design to your account and pick it right back up on your phone, tablet, or laptop. Your patterns and colors stay in sync automatically.
Clearer saving for first-timers
New here? When you save, we now explain in one tap that we'll keep your design and bring it right back after you sign in — nothing ever gets lost.
Fully available in your language
Your account, saved patterns, favorites, settings, and the design tools themselves (My Colors, the photo converter, and print exports) now work perfectly in all 11 languages — Spanish, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Thai, and both Chinese scripts.
May 2026
Mirror Mode for two-sided designs
Design back-to-back pieces — perfect for keychains, earrings, and symmetric patterns. Draw one side and the shape mirrors to the other automatically.
MARD palette: the 185-color Chinese standard
We added the full MARD (A1–H4) color system used in Chinese bead shops, plus a one-tap brand switcher right in the designer.
Paint with any color you like
A custom color picker lets you use any HEX color, and the materials list still counts every bead correctly.
Clearer printable charts
PNG and PDF exports now support cross-stitch and diamond-style symbols, mark empty cells, and stay readable even at small sizes and in non-Latin languages.
April 2026
New craft: bead loom (Miyuki Delica)
A bead-loom designer with 2,900+ Miyuki Delica colors — for woven bracelets and loom art.
Now in 11 languages
MakeBead is fully translated into 11 languages — English, Spanish, German, Japanese, Korean, French, Russian, Thai, Portuguese, and both Chinese scripts.
Share your designs
Share any pattern with a link and a preview image, and open shared designs straight into the editor to remix them.
Eight craft styles, one editor
Multi-brand palettes and a full editor across Perler, cross stitch, pixel art, Minecraft, LEGO, kandi, diamond painting, and bead loom.
~ FREE, NO SIGN-UP NEEDED ~
Try the latest — start a design now
Everything here is free and runs right in your browser. Jump into the designer and see the new tools for yourself.
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