Designing Bead Crochet Patterns

If you read this blog very much, I'm sure you've noticed that I like to do bead crochet. I also like to design my own patterns, a task which till now I did using Microsoft Powerpoint and lots of copying and pasting. Talk about tedium!

While Powerpoint works for me, I wanted some other method for creating patterns for bead crochet ropes. It's just too much of a pain to develop a design when it means hundreds of clicks to place bead-like shapes over and over again in a software not designed to do that (although I've used Powerpoint for all sorts of projects over the years - it's very versatile!).

A friend of mine awhile back sent me a link to a site called Brunold Software. Damian Brunold is the mind behind the site and the mind behind the software (called DB-BEAD), which provides a pretty nifty way to create bead crochet patterns! It doesn't really come with any instructions, but I found it to be pretty intuitive.


You can see here the tools used to create a design. The design is actually "drawn" by filling in the squares in the second graph (the one with the uneven edges). On the right, you can see the finished rope as you add to the design. There are little arrows in the tool bar at the top that let you spin the rope to see how the design will look.

The only thing I did wrong when I was playing with my first design was to start at the top and design downward. I should have known better, as bead crochet stringing is actually done from the BOTTOM of a chart. I shifted everything around and played for awhile longer, and now I'm busy crocheting the rope I designed.


You'd think that my first attempt at using this software would have made me create a simple design, just to test it out. I got a little carried away, though, and wound up creating this design of graduated diamond shapes that has a 600-bead repeating pattern. Eegads. I only strung three of the repeats, but now that I know the pattern is turning out the way I wanted it to, I'll be busy stringing some more later tonight.

I've been asked quite a lot of late if I'll ever publish any of my bead crochet patterns, and I think I might now that I have a better way of creating them. Thanks to Damian Brunold for his DB-BEAD software! :-)