Winter Cottage Fuse Bead Patterns: Roasted Chestnuts, Cocoa and Fireside Animals

Winter Chestnut Cottage gathers 20 fuse bead patterns around a snowed-in log cottage. Eight animals are dressed for the cold in knit hats, scarves and coats, and the other twelve patterns are the things around them: the cottage itself, a brick fireplace, a mug of cocoa, a pair of red mittens, snow boots and a bundle of firewood tied with a ribbon.

Chestnuts everywhere

Roasted chestnuts run through the set. The bunny in a red knit hood holds a bag of them, the kitten in a red beret has a chestnut loaf, the squirrel carries a full basket and the hedgehog in a red scarf holds a chestnut cookie. Among the objects there’s a paper pouch of roasted chestnuts, a cloth-lined chestnut basket and a slice of chestnut cake. The rest of the cast are the Cocoa Bear with a snowflake mug, the Firewood Duck in a green tree-pattern hat with a basket of firewood, the Cozy Blanket Lamb with a rolled plaid blanket, and the Warm Lantern Puppy in a blue toggle coat carrying a lantern.

Choosing where to start

Bead count and color count don’t move together here, and that’s worth knowing before you pick. The Firewood Duck needs the fewest beads of the characters, 1,962, yet it uses the most colors, 26. The Cozy Blanket Lamb goes the other way: 2,235 beads but only 21 colors. The Chestnut Cookie Hedgehog is the largest at 2,935 beads.

The twelve objects run from 757 beads (the Cozy Lantern) to 1,189 (the cottage). The Hot Water Bottle is the simplest to buy for, with 11 colors: a cream body, a red heart and a red neck. The cottage takes 22.

On 5 mm beads, the characters come out between about 8.9 and 12.6 inches wide and 13.6 to 15.7 inches tall. The objects measure about 6.9 to 8.9 inches on their longest side.

Finding your place on a chart

A character’s first page shows the artwork with its full color list. The next four pages are the chart in quarters: top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right. On the bunny they split after column 23 and row 38. The original drawing sits faintly behind the numbered squares, which helps when you lose your place in a run of identical codes. Row and column numbers carry straight on from one quarter to the next without repeating, and the count table on each quarter totals the whole character, so it shouldn’t be added up four times.

Each design numbers its colors from 01 in its own key, so check the hex values rather than the codes when you match beads. The codes aren’t from any bead maker’s range. These patterns fit standard 5 mm fuse beads such as Perler; Doodlora Studio and Perler are not affiliated. The openings of the cocoa mug, the chestnut basket and the lantern are left as empty pegs.

Print at Actual Size or 100%. The pack says no test fusing has been done, that heat is a job for an adult, and that small beads are a choking hazard.