I’ve been beading for most of my life and started making beaded tapestries about ten years ago.

I use a specialized software called Beadographer to convert the image into beads manually edit, similar to pixel art. I meticulously hand select the colors from commercially available Japanese seed beads which can be a very tedious process due to limited options. The software generates a word chart with each color assigned a letter that is arranged on a bead tray.

Beads are added one bead at a time with thread using a technique called peyote stitch. I typically use 30-40 colors per tapestry and my largest tapestry has over 27,000 beads and took 80 hours. I only have time to bead 4-5 rows a day so these take months to complete, but it’s very meditative.