Pony beads, stretchy cord, twenty minutes. Here is the whole thing, from your first single to a cuff with a picture beaded across it.
No loom, no needle, nothing you have to order in and wait for. If you can tie a shoelace you can make a single, and the whole kit fits in one hand.
Pony beads are the fat plastic ones — 9mm across, 6mm tall, with a hole about 4mm wide you could drive a truck through. A tub of a thousand costs a few dollars and will carry you through a lot of bracelets.
For cord, 0.7mm stretchy elastic is the safe middle. Stretch Magic sells that size and plenty of people swear by it. Plenty of others say the knots slip and use a thicker kandi elastic, 0.8mm or 1mm, instead. Both camps are right. Thicker cord holds a knot better; thinner cord fits more passes through one bead once you start making cuffs. Buy a small spool of each and find out which you like.
Scissors. That is the whole shopping list.
A single is one row of beads on a loop of elastic. Everyone starts here, and most of us never stop making them.
Cut about ten inches of cord so you have slack to work with instead of a tight loop you are fighting. String beads until the row wraps your wrist with a little give. Most wrists land around 28 to 30 beads. Count yours and remember it, because that number is now your number for every single you make.
Tie it off with a surgeon's knot: an overhand knot, but pass the end through twice instead of once before you pull it tight. Then tie a second one on top of it. Snip the tails to about a quarter inch and slide the knot inside the hole of the nearest bead so it disappears. That is the trick. The hole is big enough to swallow the knot, which is why a finished single has no visible join anywhere on it.
Starting points, not rules. Wrists differ, so count once and adjust.
These are the numbers the community keeps converging on, not a published spec.
Multi-stitch is the wide one — the cuff with a picture beaded across it. Beaders outside the scene call the same stitch even tubular peyote. One rule will save you an hour of confusion: your first row has to be an even number of beads. An odd base row will not close up properly, and you will not find out until you are three rows in.
The beads in each new row sit in the gaps of the row below, which is what gives a cuff that offset brick look and lets a picture read clearly across it. Getting the picture right is the genuinely hard part, because you have to know which color goes in which gap, row after row. That is the counting KandiCon does for you.
X base is the other common way to start a cuff. Instead of a tube it starts from a row of crossed beads, and it gives a more open, lattice-looking band than multi-stitch does. It is the one beginners most often get stuck on, so learn a single and a multi-stitch cuff first and come back to it.
Flat peyote, even and odd count, is the flat-panel cousin of multi-stitch and is what you want for a band that lies flat instead of wrapping into a tube. 3D pieces — charms, stars, cuffs with shapes standing off them — are built from the same stitches, just worked in more than one direction.
Step-by-step walkthroughs for each of these are in the Tutorials tab of the app, with the row counts filled in.
It will. Elastic gives out, usually at the knot. Restring it — the beads are fine, and a rebuilt bracelet is still the same bracelet. Keep the cord you did not like for practice pieces.
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