Draw lead lines across a panel, choose the glass, and move the sun around behind it. When you like what you see, print the pattern at full size and go and make it.
Keyboard: focus the window and move the cursor with the arrow keys (Shift for bigger steps). Enter sets a point: two make a straight line; for a curve, keep adding points and press Enter twice on the last one. With Glaze, Enter glazes the piece under the cursor; with Remove lead, it takes out the line nearest the cursor. Escape cancels, Ctrl+Z undoes. Hold Shift while dragging to keep straight lines to 15 degree steps.
Pick a glass, then tap pieces of the window. A line drawn through a glazed piece leaves both halves glazed.
Put in the real size of the panel. The printout is actual size: a cartoon with every piece numbered and named, then the pattern pieces with room left for the lead, then a cut list. Every page has a check square. A panel bigger than a sheet is split across pages with marks to line them up.
The heart is the thin wall in the middle of the lead that sits between two pieces. Each pattern piece gives up half of it on every side, the outside edge included, so the glass and the lead together come out at the cartoon size. Set it to match your came.
| Glass | Pieces | Area |
|---|
Areas are for the pieces themselves. You will want more than this, for breakage and for fitting the shapes onto a sheet.
A stained glass window you can design in a few minutes and make over a few weekends. Lay lead across the panel, fill the pieces with glass, and slide the sun from dawn to dusk to see how it will look in the morning and in the evening. A loose end of lead runs on until it meets other lead, because a line that stops in the middle of a piece is not a cut. Curves are eased into gentle arcs, since tight inside curves are the hard part of cutting glass, and any piece that ends up too small to cut sensibly turns amber.
When you like it, put in the real size and print. You get the cartoon, the pattern pieces already trimmed for the lead, and a cut list to take to the glass shop. All of it happens here in your browser. Nothing you draw leaves the page.
If you go and make it: wear eye protection when you cut, and wash your hands after handling lead.