About MeltZoid

MeltZoid turns a photograph into a fuse bead pegboard pattern — the kind you lay out bead by bead on a pegboard and then fuse with an iron.

Boards, not just pixels

A design larger than one board is laid across several, fused in sections, and the sections joined afterwards. That is a constraint on making the thing, not merely on printing it, so MeltZoid reports board coverage as you work: how many boards across and down, and how many in total. Width presets are one, two, three and four boards across for whichever bead size you have chosen.

Unlike a baseplate, though, a pegboard is a work surface rather than part of the finished piece, so widths are deliberately not forced to whole boards. A forty-wide design is perfectly normal — you simply want to know you need two boards across before you start.

Bead size changes everything

Mini beads are 2.6 mm, midi 5 mm, maxi 10 mm, and each has its own standard square board. The size you pick decides the finished dimensions, the board count and how fiddly the work will be. Beads are round seen from above, so a grid of N × M really is N by M beads in both directions.

Designs do not have to be rectangles

Alongside the full rectangle, a design can be cut to a circle, a regular hexagon, a heart or a five-pointed star. Beads outside the outline are simply absent: they take no palette entry and appear in no count, so a 58×58 heart is 2,090 beads rather than 3,364, and the shopping list says so. These are design outlines rather than tracings of any particular shaped board.

How the photograph is reduced

The crop is averaged to one cell per bead in linear light, colours are reduced by weighted k-means in CIELAB so the reduction minimises perceived error, and each resulting colour is matched to the nearest bead by CIEDE2000. It is seeded deterministically, so the same photograph and settings always give you the same pattern.

Last updated September 2026.