There was a time when flat or two-dimensional peyote stitch was all anyone knew. Until ca. 1800 BC, that is, when the ancient Egyptians invented three-dimensional peyote stitch, a game-changing advance..

How did ancient bead stringers align strands of beads? With spacer plates made of carved bone or pure gold. In this article, beadwork historian Valerie Hector shows an example of spacer plate stringing in a man’s beaded girdle dating to ca. 4000 BC in ancient Egypt - a girdle now housed in the British Museum.