Handcrafting calmness with colored beads

A worker (middle front) helps fuse customers' Perler bead creations with a machine in a pindou shop in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, on June 6. ZHU XINGXIN/CHINA DAILY

In a small fuse bead workshop in Chengdu, Sichuan province, Liu Meiqi and several young people sit around a table on which hundreds of tiny plastic beads in every color imaginable are ready for their use.

With steady hands and focused eyes, Liu carefully picks up beads with tweezers, placing them one by one onto a pegboard. The room is quiet, filled only by the soft clicking of tweezers and the occasional sigh of satisfaction as someone holds up a finished creation to the light.

In China this popular handcrafting activity is known as "pindou", or Perler beads in the West. Practitioners arrange small plastic beads on a pegboard and fuse them with heat to create pixel-style designs.

Pindou is part of the world of "shoucuo" — literally, hand rubbed — a handcrafting trend that has taken China's social media by storm.

Originally a gaming term referring to skilled manual play, it has recently gone viral on Chinese social media, evolving into a lifestyle phenomenon and a new consumption trend for young people who are looking for authentic, tangible experiences.

Besides Perler bead design, the handcrafting activities also include ceramics and scenery-themed sticker making.