Adapting Peyote Stitch to Needlepoint

Perhaps you’ve seen lovely amulet bags, bracelets, and other items made from seed beads in a brick-like pattern. You may even have seen special graph paper with the brick grid already on it. These jewelry items are made from a beading technique called flat peyote beading. It’s lovely and very popular.

Because I don’t bead, I have always looked longingly at these designs, but never tried it. I’ve been thinking these designs could easily be adapted to needlepoint using Brick Stitch, but I worried about how to do the adaptation. Anew catalog from Fire Mountain Gems had charming Flat Peyote Stitch elements that were small enough to make it easy to adapt them. The beaded original is pictured below.

You can see clearly the offset pattern characteristic of Peyote Stitch in beading and Brick Stitch in needlepoint. My first thought was to translate one bead to a single Brick Stitch. Because this stitch is taller than it is wide, it retained the offset patterns but distorted the shape. The elongated diamond became a square set on its point.

By using Double Brick, below, I got closer to the shape of the beads which is more square than rectangular,

Geometric and abstract designs will work best. Because Double Brick is not exactly the same shape as the beads used for Peyote Stitch, realistic designs and letters may be distorted. You’ll have to experiment.

There are plenty of resources of free Flat Peyote Stitch patterns to adapt. Here are some places to get you stsated;

• Fire Mountain Gems free designs & info
• Flowers
• Peyote Stitch patterns of various kinds
>Facet free patterns
• Mistletoe Stocking
• Beaded Images
• All Free Jewelry Making

The richest source of patterns I’ve found is Pinterest. There are many charts stored there, searchfor”flat peyote stitch pattern.”