Inside the app
Four of the screens you will spend the most time on.
Snap a photo, pick how big and how colorful you want it, and KandiCon turns it into a real pony-bead pattern, with a bead shopping list and row-by-row instructions so you can actually make it. It's free on the App Store for iPhone and iPad and on Google Play for Android, and the latest version is live now. You can also use it in your browser with the same account, no download.
You need to know which bead goes where, row after row. KandiCon works that out on your device, with no internet connection.
Four of the screens you will spend the most time on.
Kandi (sometimes spelled candy) is the name for the bright, beaded bracelets, cuffs, and charms made from pony beads — those little plastic beads with a big round hole, in every color of the rainbow.
Pony beads have been a cheap craft bead since the 1970s. Modern kandi grew up in the 1990s as a way to make something by hand and trade it with a friend — a single-strand bracelet, a wide multi-row cuff, a 3D charm shaped like a heart or a mushroom.
Pony beads are cheap, and they are very hard to ruin. A few dollars of beads and a length of stretchy cord is all it takes. You can make a simple single strand in a few minutes, or spend an afternoon on a 30-row cuff with a picture beaded right into it.
That last part — beading a picture into a cuff — is the hard part. You have to figure out which beads, in which order, row by row. That's the exact problem KandiCon was built to solve.
Browse ready-to-make starter patterns, generate your own from a photo or an emoji, and pick the style that matches what you are stringing.
Most people want to show somebody the thing they just made. Save a pattern to your library, publish it for others to bead, post a photo or a video of the finished piece, and browse what everyone else has been stringing.
Kandi is made to be traded: you make one, your friend makes one, you swap. Follow the makers whose work you like, leave a comment, message a friend, and start from a pattern somebody else loved and make it your own.
KandiCon is built for young makers. Every post and every profile can be reported, hidden or blocked, everyone agrees to the same community guidelines, and there are no ads, no ad networks and no third-party tracking anywhere in the app. Browsing and making never need an account at all.
Trading works better face to face, and that is what the events are for.
KandiCon is coming to the Javits Center in New York City. A full weekend of kandi: workshops on every technique, a huge trading floor, live pattern challenges with prizes, vendor booths, and meetups with the makers you follow. Beginners welcome, with kits and help on site.
Dates are being finalized with the venue now, so there is no weekend to announce yet. Smaller things happen in between: bead bashes, bead-alongs and local meetups, announced in the app first. Tap I'm going on any of them and you will hear first when tickets drop.
KandiCon started with Laila and a giant tub of pony beads.
Laila has been beading for years, and she got past plain bracelets fast. She works whole pictures into her cuffs, planning the rows and colors by hand on paper first.
That's where the idea came from. If she could turn a picture in her head into a beaded cuff, why couldn't an app do the hard counting and let kids spend their time on the fun part — the making? KandiCon is built around the way Laila actually beads: pick something you love, work out the colors, string it row by row, and share it.
Every starter pattern in the app is a bracelet Laila made first. She tests every build before anyone else sees it.
