How to Use Stained-Glass Patterns

Video Transcript

When you do a stained glass project you almost always are going to be working from a pattern, and a pattern printed on paper. You can do free-form stained glass once you learn the techniques, you know once you have pieces of glass and you can kind of make it up as you go along. Cut pieces, do something kind of abstract, you know a project like that rarely ends up square but you can make nice little sun catchers or little things to prop up in the window that way in that kind of free-form style. But for anything that is really thought out in advance, a nice sort of window panels and certainly designs that have a real image in there, a real geometric shape or a real image, you work off of a pattern that is printed on paper and you can get those patterns at your stained glass supply store. You can find books filled with patterns at a stained glass supply store or even at a lot of your hobby and arts and crafts supply, you know supply stores, suppliers, you can probably go to your library, find stained glass patterns, you can certainly get them off of the internet, there is really just probably an infinite number of patterns out there and you know you can even download patterns off of the internet. Some of them even for free, take them into your graphic arts you know, kind of software package, make them look larger, make them smaller, print them out and work from those. Okay, but one thing that you will notice when you look at patterns is that there seems to be, there are certain rules that stained glass patterns have to follow and I want to talk about those rules a little bit because you should understand them because a lot of those rules come from how glass behaves and how you can and can't cut glass and also from a second idea which is how do you make sure that your project is strong and will sort of, is durable and will last and so that is more of a question as to how do you assemble your joints together. So we are going to talk about that next, about kind of the theory of stained glass design and that will help you understand the patterns that you use, if you find your own patterns out of books or get them off the internet or wherever you get them but it will also help you design you own patterns if you decide to.

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