Brick stitch hangs rows off a ladder. The ladder — beads joined side by side with their holes upright — is the widest row of the piece. Every row after is caught on the thread between two beads of the row below, so each row sits half a bead out of line with the one before, like courses of bricks. The app's own lesson opens with exactly that: "Each new bead is caught on the thread between two beads of the row below, so the rows sit offset like bricks in a wall."
Because rows hang rather than stack, they can grow and shrink freely — one bead fewer each row makes a point, which is the entire trick behind brick's favorite shapes. The app draws its earring starters as a Triangle, Point down, Diamond or Hexagon, and each narrows to a two-bead tip, one bead fewer per row out from the widest. Artbeads' brick tutorial works the same arithmetic: fewer beads a row makes the point, and since every row starts by picking up two beads, two is where a tip stops.
If you've already read the peyote guide, there's a quiet joke here. Peyote's first warning was to start over if your beads sat in a ladder — flat, side by side, wrong. Brick stitch starts exactly there. The ladder the peyote chart avoids is brick's row zero, and herringbone starts from the same strip. One ladder, two stitches.
| Item | What to get | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| The beads | Delica cylinder beads, size 11/0 | Their even shape keeps the rows straight, the app's own reason for starting you here. Round seed beads size 11/0 or 15/0 chart too — softer look, same moves |
| Needle | Size 10 or 12 beading needle | A long, thin needle made for seed beads |
| Thread | Start with about 1.5 m (5 ft) | A longer thread means fewer joins; you can add more later. The app's thread lesson says both |
| Findings | Ear wires and jump rings | One of each per earring; a pendant takes a bail instead. Those two are the whole findings list — no clasp, the earrings hang themselves |
| Extras | Scissors | That's the kit. No loom, no frame, no stop bead — brick starts from a tail |
Brick makes single pieces, not strips that repeat to a length — an earring is worked twice, a pendant once. So a starter's size isn't a length target; it's the chart you draw on. The app offers three:
| Starter | The chart | The bead | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Earrings | 11 beads across, 11 rows | Delicas, 11/0 | A pair — the Supplies list counts it twice |
| Earrings with fringe | 13 beads across, 12 rows, fringe below | Delicas, 11/0 | A pair. The fringe hangs from the lowest bead of each column |
| Pendant | 15 beads across, 20 rows | Delicas, 11/0 | One piece — the blank one you draw your shape on |
Two things the app does with those charts are worth knowing before your first bead. First, a brick chart starts empty — the outline you draw is the design, and the widest row you draw is the ladder Make works from. Second, More > Earring shape will draw the shape for you: Triangle, Point down, Diamond or Hexagon. The shape's rows come one bead fewer out from the widest, down to the two-bead tip — the app describes a triangle as "From 11 beads at the bottom to 2 at the top". Where a hexagon stops, it stops at flat ends about half as wide as its middle, so its sloping sides stay about as long as its ends.
The sizes, while they're on screen: brick beads stand with their holes upright, so each row climbs the bead's length — 1.3 mm for a Delica — and the width runs edge to edge of the beads you actually drew. The app says it plainly: a brick stitch piece measures the beads drawn, not the chart — an earring is usually drawn smaller than its chart, which starts empty. Draw nothing, buy nothing.
The shape of the piece is the widths of its rows, and every width change has a move. The app reads each row's width against the row it hangs from and prints the difference right on the row:
| The row vs the one below | What happens | The move |
|---|---|---|
| One bead fewer (a decrease) | The usual narrowing — rows one narrower each way make the point of an earring | The ordinary row: the two-bead start, then one per loop. This is why it gets no note at all |
| One bead more (an increase) | The shape widens | "Start under the first thread loop instead of the second, and at the end add one more bead on the last loop" — the app's note verbatim; Perles' Corner and Fire Mountain Gems teach the same two moves |
| The same width | The row sits half a bead out to one side — that's the brick-offset look at full width | Out where you start: begin under the first loop. Out where you finish: the usual start plus one more bead on the last loop. Make works out which side and says so |
| More than one bead either way | The row can't read itself off the loop count | The app tells you plainly: check the chart for where the row starts and ends |
The same-width rule is the honest geometry of this stitch: rows stay dead-centered only when the widths step by one, three or five. A row with the same number of beads as its neighbor, or two more or fewer, can only sit half a bead to one side — a wall whose courses don't alternate, which is brick's geometry doing its thing rather than your tension misbehaving. The app's examples are drawn with one-bead steps for exactly this reason.
Fringe — the part that makes it look like a lot more work than it was — hangs from the lowest bead of each column. The app's Make tab builds the fringe steps after the rows, strand by strand, following the thread you already have:
The Fringe sheet has opinions about the shape of the fringe, which it will make for any drawn earring: all the strands one length, longest in the middle, longest at the sides, or a wave. The shortest strand starts at about four tenths of the longest, every strand is editable bead by bead (40 is the most a strand can carry), and the app counts the longest strand into the earring's finished height — the beads of a fringe add their length straight down, since the holes run up and down.
| Symptom | The real cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| The ladder is bumpy and the rows lean from the first rows on | The ladder's holes weren't upright, so the columns started crooked | Re-ladder with the holes upright — a figure-eight ladder of eleven Delicas is a five-minute rebuild, cheaper than any row that inherits it |
| A row bulges out where the earring should stay level | A same-width row (or two apart): brick geometry pushes it half a bead out of line | Pick the side the chart wants: start under the first loop for the starting side, or the usual start plus a spare bead on the last loop for the finishing side. Make prints which one |
| Rows sag, or a bead sits double where one belongs | A loop missed, or two beads caught on one loop | Count by the printed rule — 2 to start, then 1 on each loop — and the loop count becomes the bead count. Unpick back to the last row that still looks solid and rebuild from there |
| The tip won't close to a single bead | It isn't supposed to: a brick row starts with two, so two is the floor | Let the point end at two beads — that's the tip every app shape narrows to |
| The thread estimate ran out mid-earring | It's a rough estimate, as the Supplies screen says — brick passes round every loop and the fringe strands thread their beads twice | Work with an arm's length or so and add thread as you go; joins hidden between beads are invisible in this stitch |
| The fringe strands end up the wrong lengths on the finished earring | The strand colors and lengths were read in the wrong order — strands are numbered in the order you work them | Follow the Make order, first strand at the end where the rows finished; the app starts the fringe where your thread is |
Plain arithmetic on the app's own drawn example patterns, with the shopping list's 10% spare (advanced mode offers 0, 10 or 20%), Delicas counted at 200 beads to the gram, and the shop's real 7.2 g Delica tube. The app deliberately claims grams and never packs — tube sizes vary by seller — so the grams are the truth and the tube is the errand:
| Example piece | Beads all told | With the 10% spare | Grams | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Triangle earrings (a pair, 2–11 beads a row, 10 rows) | 130 | 143 | 0.7 g | 1 tube of 7.2 g |
| Fringe earrings (a pair, 2–13 a row + 13 strands, 2 to 14 beads long) | 376 | 414 | 2.1 g | 1 tube of 7.2 g |
Thread, on the same arithmetic: the app estimates about 3.2 bead-diameters of thread per bead, plus 50 cm a piece, and labels it a rough estimate — the pair of triangle earrings works out to about 1.7 m (1.8 yd). The Pendant pack starts blank at 15 across and 20 rows: its beads are the ones your drawing uses, so the Supplies list literally cannot lie to you until you've drawn. The shopping-list builder runs the same math in the browser — beads × rows or drawn shapes with the spare, grams and tubes per line — with the finishing notes attached: galvanized finishes can rub off with wear and dyed colors can fade in sun or water, and Duracoat or PermaFinish are the made-to-last finishes when the list sees one.
And what the method doesn't cover, honestly: circular brick and the fancy 3D builds. The app charts flat rows on a ladder — earrings, fringes, pendants — and stops there. The loop and the two-bead start in your hands, though, are the whole of what those tutorials build on.
Once the ladder and the loop are under your hands, the shapes build themselves — two to start, one per loop, next row. The herringbone guide starts from the very same ladder and leans pairs into Vs; the cross-stitch guide moves a grid of beads onto fabric instead. And for the words you just met — ladder, thread loop, tail — the glossary has them drawn out.