One gets strung and worn, the other gets ironed flat. Here is how to tell them apart and which brands you can mix.
Both are cheap plastic beads in every color. They are not interchangeable, and picking the wrong one is the most common first mistake.
If you want a bracelet, you want pony beads. If you want a flat sprite of a character to hang on a bag, you want perler.
A pony bead is a 9mm by 6mm barrel with a hole around 4mm. That hole is the whole reason kandi works — it is wide enough to pass cord through several times and to swallow a knot.
Fuse beads are smaller and come in two sizes that matter. The standard size, usually called midi, is what most Perler, Hama and Artkal sets use, and people mix those brands on one board all the time.
Minis are where it bites. Perler and Artkal minis are 2.6mm, Hama minis are 2.5mm, and mini pegboards are not interchangeable between them. A tenth of a millimeter sounds like nothing until a hundred pegs have added it up and your last column will not sit down.
One Artkal gotcha: the S series is a hard bead and the R series is soft. Mixing hard and soft on one board melts unevenly.
Medium heat, no steam, ironing paper over the top, and keep the iron moving in small circles for roughly ten to twenty seconds. Flip the whole panel and do the other side the same way. Going hotter or holding still flattens the beads into puddles and closes up the holes.
Plenty of people do both, and a perler charm clipped onto a pony-bead cuff is a very normal thing to own.
The hard part is identical for both crafts: working out which color bead goes in which cell, given that you can only buy about thirty colors. KandiCon matches every part of a photo to the nearest real bead color and hands you the grid and the counts, so the maths is done before you open a bag.
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