Printing a bead pattern at true size

Turn scaling off. At 100% one printed cell is one 5 mm bead, and the sheet becomes a template.

There are two ways to use a printed pattern, and they are not equally good. You can read it like a map, counting squares across and down; or you can lay it under a transparent pegboard and place beads directly over the printed cells. The second is faster, and it only works if the print is at true size.

True size means one printed cell is 5 mm, exactly the pitch of the pegs on a midi board. Get that right and the sheet lines up with the board peg for peg. Get it wrong by a few per cent and the error accumulates across the width until the last column is a whole bead out.

The setting that ruins it is called different things in different print dialogs: «fit to page», «shrink oversized pages», «scale to fit». All of them mean the same thing, and all of them must be off. Look for «actual size», «100%», or «custom scale: 100».

Check before you cut anything: measure ten cells with a ruler. Ten midi cells should be exactly 5 cm. If they are 4.7, your printer is scaling and the dialog is lying about it — some drivers apply a small margin shrink of their own on top of whatever you chose.

The colour codes are printed inside the cells as well as in the list, so a black and white printer is not a problem. Read the codes rather than the shades, and the pattern works exactly as well; the ink costs less, too.

For patterns with several close greys or blues, a mono print is genuinely easier to work from than a colour one. On paper those shades are two per cent apart and your eye slides between them; the printed code does not.

The colour list is the page to print even if you print nothing else. It is the shopping list and the counting sheet in one: count out each colour into a pile before you start, and you find out you are forty light blues short at the beginning of the evening rather than three quarters of the way through it.

If the pattern is wider than the paper, print at 100% across two sheets and overlap them rather than shrinking to fit. Two sheets taped together are still a working template; one shrunk sheet is only a picture of one.