I’ve been working on a fun stitching project, but I ran into an all-too-common problem: getting the right amount of supplies. The materials list called for 15 g of cube beads. I purchased my beads from a source that sells them in 14 g tubes, so I ordered two tubes. My completed project used about 7 g and I have a tube and half left over. That’s a lot of extra beads!
Overestimating the amount of materials you need is almost always a good thing, but this goof in the list (and my failure to detect it before ordering my beads) makes me think that estimating the amount of seed beads I need can be challenging. For one thing, I have trouble picturing a gram – it’s not a typical unit of measurement in the U.S. It’s such a miniscule amount that it can be hard to detect the difference between one gram and two. Perhaps our international readers have an easier time of it.
To give myself a better grasp of how many beads are in one gram, I put some seed beads on a scale and took some readings. I added beads to the scale until the digital reader flipped from 0 g to 1 g. In this photo you can see several 1 g piles of beads. From left to right you can see sizes 6, 8 and 11 seed beads, size 11 cylinders, and size 15 seed beads. The differences in amounts are rather interesting!
