Welcome to Pattern Archive! You might be wondering about this site if you found yourself here, so let's talk about that. Let's start out with why!

Why Pattern Archive?

Glass patterns used to be passed down through studios and distributed between friends or locally, then came the decline of glasswork along with the digital move of society. During this period access to many patterns dwindled due to the closing of business, artists retiring or dying and the overall lack of interest in glass as also seen with lots of loss in specialty glass knowledge too. Nobody was keeping records of patterns and few people cared about their future, they were just lost to time. The patterns that did manage to make it online are not easy to find generally in various file formats with most being relegated to multiple incomplete snapshots of the internet. There wasn't a good way to share or find patterns then either so they are spread across dozens and dozens of websites.

We wanted to fix that by digging through physical and digital archives to retrieve these lost patterns to gather them into one massive collection while making it easy to share and find patterns was the idea. Now we are here working with that idea, turning it into reality.

Our Goals

Pattern Archive was created to solve many things, though the #1 goal being a high quality digital archive of every possible pattern created making it easily findable and shareable.

With a dataset like this there's so much more we can provide thus naturally there are some secondary goals.

• Complete descriptive tagging of the content of everything within the archive. We want you to have the easiest time finding anything you could ever want.
• Provide easy to use tools for preparing the pattern to be used in effectively any method possible.
• Create a community first space.
• Making sure every pattern is understandable with all the information needed to create it.
• Attributing and keeping the archive fair as possible to artists living, selling or dead.

We want to be meeting these goals in the least invasive, fairest way to all people. No hidden fees, No subscriptions, No data collection, all while being built for people by people.

Pattern Features:

On every pattern you will find the following:

• See the Community Rating (Stars) and Difficulty Rating (Broken Panes) that users have given this pattern for how much they like this pattern and how hard it was respectively.
• Metadata about the pattern like the size, author and upload date.
• Tags that identify detailed aspects of every pattern.
• Togglable layers that our tools make use of while allowing you to see different parts of the pattern as needed.
• Downloading/Printing of the pattern in multiple file types with the ability to rescale or posterize (tile/multi-page) each pattern.
• Color planner that lets you color each part and print the result.

Community Features:

If you decide to make an account you get lots of extra features!

• Your own account page that you can customize with photos, finished work and some information about you.
• Marking yourself as a pattern artist that allows you to display some of your favorite patterns for everyone to see along with showing a list of all the patterns you are listed as an author on to anyone that visits your page.
• The ability to submit your own votes on every pattern for the Community Rating and Difficulty Rating.
• Access to favorites and completion tracking of patterns.
• Create your own groups of patterns called Collections which you can share with other people.

Read more about site-functions/user-accounts.

Timeline

• January 2026: Work on Pattern Archive started! Though it wasn't known as Pattern Archive yet, it started out as PatternHub.
• April 18 2026: PatternHub had recently been renamed to Pattern Archive and went into a "private" beta phase. Released to the Stained Glass discord for testing and help with the archival work itself.
• May 19 2026: The first 100 patterns had been uploaded!
• June 26 2026: Passed 200 patterns uploaded!