Short, honest explainers — the sizing system, the finishes, the math you'll actually use, and a quiz to pick your first craft.
Seed bead sizes come from "aught" sizing, historically pegged to how many beads fit end-to-end in an inch: an 11/0 is roughly eleven to the inch. Modern beads drifted from that standard decades ago — a Delica 11/0 sits closer to 17 or 18 to the inch — so the numbers today are family names, not measurements. Practical translation: bigger number = smaller bead, and the sizes you almost always want are 8/0 (chunky, forgiving), 11/0 (the default) and 15/0 (texture and accents). The full decoder is in the Seed Beads 101 guide.
Every finish is paint made hot. Inside a glass bead factory, the "silver lining" is a real metal film deposited on the bead's inner surface — light comes in, bounces off metal, comes back out. Opaque beads get their color from the glass batch itself. Galvanized and AB finishes are surface coatings: gorgeous, and the reason matte iridescent beads can shed their shine under real wear. A bench rule of thumb: coatings are paint, glass is furniture — build your structural colors on opaque and translucent glass, spend the coatings on accents. The full decoder table also lives in the supply guide.
One number decides whether your finished cuff claps or droops, and it isn't the pattern — it's beads per inch. At roughly 17 beads per inch for a Delica 11/0, a 6¾ inch band is about 115 beads per column; the same column in round 11/0 is closer to 110; in 8/0 you're nearer 80. Every chart in the Bead Bench app prints at the real bead size of the beads you chose, with a 1 in and a 5 cm check bar so you can audit your own printer — because "printed at true size" is a claim you can verify with a ruler in five seconds.
Bead thread comes in two temperaments: fishing-line style (FireLine, WildFire) — stiff, nearly unbreakable, holds tension without training; and nylon (Nymo, One-G, KO) — soft and drapy, needs stretching and wax, rewards patience with a beautiful hand. Neither is "better": line-style threads taught most of us peyote, nylon taught us the rest. What ruins work isn't the choice — it's drifting tension, which is why every guide here keeps repeating the same three words: snug, not crushed.
Here's an accessibility habit worth stealing even if you see color perfectly: putting a letter under every bead color. Colors that look alike — which is nearly all of them, in some light, to somebody — stop being a memory test. The Bead Bench app has the toggle built in under Accessibility (free always); Bead Memory on this site's Playground has too. Read charts with your eyes, not with wishful thinking.
Sixty seconds, six questions, one honest recommendation.
Eleven crafts, free charts, real video, and an app that carries every stitch's Learn page. Start anywhere — that's rather the point.