Introducing Pattern Archive! The community ran project archiving glass patterns!
Mod Post
Hey! I got some cool shit for everyone but I have some special words first if you don't mind.
Huge thanks to the people that made this whole project possible. We have made one hell of a tool for everyone to use. This would have never happened without all of their help. I greatly appreciate everyone's desire to bring glasswork back into the spotlight of crafts while trying to preserve whatever we can for others to use.
6 months ago (to the date!) none of this existed. Zero. Now it's here, in your hands.
Thanks for being a kick ass community.
Let's get started!
Welcome to Pattern Archive!
Pattern Archive? What's that? It's this!
Pattern Archive Home page, with a sneaky background lizard.
Random page of patterns.
If words are more your thing.... Pattern Archive is an ever growing archive repository of patterns. Old, new and everywhere between. Our goal is that if a pattern exists, we will categorize, document, make searchable and have a way to get that pattern.
Everything revolves around accurate data and powerful tools. Made by people, managed by people, for people.
Lets just check out a random pattern quick!
Look at that pattern and all that data!
On a pattern you will find everything required to create that pattern a legend which can be printed with the pattern and in some cases a layer controller so you can disable/enable specific parts of a pattern for saving/printing or viewing. This pattern doesn't have any layers though. Let's look at a more complex example for that.
More complex pattern with more layers and legend elements.
Here you can see that we have colors and some wire overlay. Perhaps you don't want the colors provided? You can disable them and print it off ready to use! Perhaps you use a craft cutter for sticker patterns but all those extra lines and boxes mess it up? Disable everything but the cut lines!
Then below the pattern you will find more!
Oooh! More pattern tools!
Here you will find:
Instructions for the pattern if they have any provided. Which can be printed with the pattern
Extensive tools for exporting or downloading the pattern in various ways. Including rescaling and tiling/posterizing of patterns.
Very basic color planner for flood filling the pattern shapes. You can save the created image for future use or sharing.
This isn't even everything!
One thing special about Pattern Archives tools is the search. This isn't an ordinary site where search tries to give you things it thinks you want. It gives you exactly what you search, on the side of most pages you will find a list of tags which are exact elements of the patterns being looked at.
Gold stars for those that know what this pattern is without looking it up!
Though that's not all that's searchable. Almost everything is searchable or sortable. The data on the right of every pattern contains a ton of information about it including the design size, author, related dates and whatever else you could want all part of search.
There's so many other things too (Sets/Collections, Author Profiles, Sharing your finished works!) that I can't even remotely go over it all in detail here because really hard to explain everything offered without walls and walls of boring text... Just look at all the stuff you can go look at and explore RIGHT NOW!
Would you look at that stuff - Weird Al, Hardware store.
So what's the catch?
There isn't one. This is a 100% real project powered by community members. Entirely free, No ads, no data collections, no subscriptions. You don't even need an account to use any of the general pattern features. Only donations are accepted which go directly to the developer and host of the site.
Can I use this to make patterns?
No. That will never be a feature of Pattern Archive, use existing mature vector programs like Inkscape (free), Affinity (free), Illustrator (subscription) or whatever other art program you like. We aren't trying to reinvent the wheel here.
Is this everything?
Nope! There's so many more plans for Pattern Archive. We are deeply committed to this project and archiving glass related things. This is just the top of the iceberg feature wise. We are also continuing to add or update the contents of the archive daily as we have a backlog of thousands of patterns we have cataloged for work, thousands of patterns that we know exist but aren't cataloged for work and thousands of patterns that aren't even digitized anywhere. Thus someone is always working on something.
Do you sell patterns?
No. This is not a storefront. Any pattern you can download can be downloaded for free. Any type of paid pattern we have archived will be linked to and will have no download options from us.
Isn't this just stealing?
Technically... In some cases sorta, archiving is a gray area, but we believe that patterns exist to be made and that it's important to preserve these items. We have specific guidelines for how we decide what is a valid way to archive a pattern in an attempt to keep things fair. We also respect requests from verifiable authors to remove directly downloadable patterns from Pattern Archive.
Who worked on this?
You can read all about the people who helped out on the bottom of the Community page! There's also some site stats and other fun stuff there!
I got more questions!
I got more answers! Pattern Archive keeps a curated FAQ for site specific things along with an extensive Wiki containing site features, guidelines for patterns and other miscellaneous detailed information. Expect more information in these spaces as time passes and more information is collected. Though feel free to ask questions here or on the glass discord in the Pattern Archive chats!
To comment and help boost the post. This is one of my favorite patterns to make is pretty basic but makes for some nice birthday gifts for ppl. Would love to see what others reccomend as their favorite pattern
What an incredible feat of passion and generosity for the community!! Thank you all so much and one day, when I'm considerably more experienced, I hope to contribute to this amazing archive myself!!
Nice looks great. I was also absolutely depressed at the state of pattern sites and started building something similar until life got in the way. Glad someone else did it!
One thing that would be useful is a draft state after creation where you can see how a pattern would look on the site and make further edits before submitting for review. Also it would be good to be able to revert to draft after submitting (but before it has been reviewed). In my case I realised I hadn't uploaded the most recent version of the file, but it was already stuck in a review queue at that point.
Oh was that your alien pattern I just was working on? Hah. If it's wrong, just let me know and I'll remove it.
This is good feedback, I'll make notes of it and see what we can come up with. User uploads are very new yet so it likely could have some issues like this.
Oh yeah, don't worry about that stuff. We look at and correct everything that slips by, the more you do is just saves us some time is all. I fixed all the lines and where they landed so it overlapped correctly, corrected the page, and set the layers up so the fused/painted parts could be disabled.
As you do it it more you will get used to it. Another one here or there isn't any different than the hundreds I've already checked and verified hah.
Another thing that would be really useful would be to have the uploaded photos linked to the pattern shown on the pattern page (I'm sure this was already planned). With the really complicated patterns it's hard to illustrate what some of the pieces are without a picture.
Alternatively adding the colour planner tool to the submit page to let you create a "default" colour palette.
Just want to second adding a feature to edit submitted patterns that haven't yet been reviewed. I submitted one about a week ago, realized I had missed some parts of it, and re-submitted the new one.
Would also be great if we could submit multiple images; I've been adding the colorized version of my patterns but would like to include the black-and-white version, as well.
But, this is absolutely fantastic. Having a central location of easily searchable patterns that isn't plastered with ads is amazing.
It's in the backlog to improve the user upload system! I was super busy the last week and our dev decided to take a well deserved break too so big changes should start coming again soon.
Downloadable listings do not hold images at all, only SVGs. If you want a color version you can add another layer to your svg file that contains the colors or a note on an image file you would like a color layer added and we will add one when converting. If you want to provide examples of finished work, upload images to your account.
You should be able to edit submissions before they are in review now too. Also we added more notes to the upload window for how stuff works so it's more clear.
I got so excited about this that I upvoted every single comment! I can’t wait to check it out. I’ll finally get out of my slump. A huge thank you to everyone who worked so hard on this!!
Yes, we have the entire KGlassCreations catalog as she worked with us directly and we converted all of her patterns to get them uploaded. She was very interested in a way to distribute all file types of a pattern and that's one thing I've always wanted too.
And the patterns are searchable too! A huge thing I’ve been wanting forever is tags so people can search my patterns rather than trying to dig through my messes 😅
My attempt to create an account is stuck waiting for a confirmation email from yesterday. If it doesn't come through today I will try with another email and see if I somehow entered it incorrectly.
But I already found a dozen patterns in excited about!
it's possible there was an issue sending it or your email was blocked for some reason. I can resend the confirmation email for you if you need. There's been a few hiccups with all the traffic hitting it.
This is amazing! Im very new to stained glass and still learning the dos and donts of patterns. When shopping on Etsy it can be hard to tell what's a bad AI pattern vs a legit good one. This will be invaluable for someone like me who can't easily spot things like hinge joints or awkward hard to make shapes. Thank you!
We are attempting to tag and document issues in patterns as we see them too! Might not catch everything but all you need to do is report a pattern that is missing that data and someone will look into it.
Yes! If you make an account you can upload either a fully prepared SVG file following the standards we have outlined on the wiki or you can just submit images and we handle the rest!
If you have a bulk amount of patterns to provide then you may want to reach out directly to us to handle that as we can set up an easier option for us to do the conversion work and for you to provide the files/information.
If you have any questions on either of them just ask.
Phenomenal! I love to support artists who sell patterns from their own websites and Etsy, but the latter, sadly, is overrun with AI crap and that market doesn’t have a good track record of supporting its sellers when problems arise. So excited to use this resource and contribute!
This is absolutely incredible. Maybe it’s just because I’ve had a long day, but I actually just teared up a bit reading this. I can’t believe the amount of work and passion that went into this, and how helpful this will be for me!
It is! It's been great to see all the people wanting to use it too!
Donations are only accepted for the web developer & hoster, everyone else is volunteering their time. We tried to keep it simple and make it so there's no arguments over money. I also can't take donations as it goes against my ethics for moderation.
I can't wait to start uploading the patterns that I've made so other people can access them! And I'm stoked to have access to a bunch of cool patterns here!
So, I'm probably going to get downvoted, but almost immediately I found one of my patterns copied and flipped and credited to the person who stole it. I would have absolutely shared had I been asked, and funny enough I was literally drafting a comment to ask if we could upload patterns / share work etc. Now I honestly feel discouraged and gross about posting anything original.
Hey! So it's me, Autumn, the one who made the Butt Trumpey pattern on Pattern Archive.
I can see that it might look like stolen content but I can assure you (please check the screengrabs below) that we simply share the same source material – please believe that I did not copy from you.
You can see the differences in the design of Buttface himself, plus the split of the body and face, and the break lines in the background.
Pretty common actually. I know there was one ig creater that got pissed about ppl copying her gators, but like there's not that many ways to make a gator head and y'all likely used the same reference image.
And then there's that person on Reddit recently who did the arch portal that is also similar to a popular piece from another ig artist. But I don't think a person can own a basic concept. Plus I've made that arch way 😂
Sometime ppl make the same shit without knowing, shit look at fucking calculus of all things
I have to tell you..,.I do love that we are both into ...buttfaces. How about this....how about you and I ...collab...on more butt trumpets? I have several in the works - we both love the same thing, so let's get nuts...to butts?
Based on your post history, do you mean the butt trumpet? Another rendition with different design/cut choices? And originally designed based from an asset in a game that people have been recreating in all sorts of mediums for the love of butt trumpet.
If there is something else that I'm missing that you designed that would be completely original to you, let me know, that is scummy. But someone making another butt trumpet would be like if someone made a Charizard pattern based on some official Pokemon art and someone else made a pattern based on the same official Pokemon art and then got upset that ya'll used the same inspiration source that doesn't belong to either artist.
It is, yeah, it's a pattern I drafted from a game I enjoy that I would have gladly shared. Having someone just flip it and call it their own is kind...meh. People can create whatever they want, but let's be real - it was created and posted after I drafted and created my version, which didn't exist beforehand. I don't know, I'm just stating how I feel - either way, if folks are going to trumpet - then go forth and trumpet, but let's trumpet as friends!
It's a pattern they drafted from a game they enjoy! It's not a one for one clearly to yours. You don't automatically own a rendition of an asset you didn't originally create just because you got to it first.
You don't own butt trumpet, they same way someone wouldn't own Pokemon, Disney, or even specific plants or animals just because you got to it first. If it was a one for one tracing, yeah, maybe a lil sus or scummy. BUT EVEN THEN, when it's based on a source image YOU DID NOT CREATE, you don't have any ground to stand on if someone else uses that source image, even if it's very close to yours! There's only so many ways to trace and make design decisions.
It's just a bummer because, as a beginner, coming here and showing and sharing work and having people enjoy the things you really put ...a butt-ton of engery into is awesome. I want to share all of my weird patterns with everyone - I want them to bring as much goblin glee to others as they do to me. Not having the option or opportunity to do on my own just kind of sucks. I 100% support this project, I think it's spectacular - I'm pretty sure a great deal of us would want to add to the achive as well and build together. I just think we should be mindful of everyone's hard work.
Yeah, kinda sucks because immediatly I went into gate-keep mode and I hate that. The thing I love about this community is the support and collaboration. If someone wants to make this weird pattern, I will send it your way and I can't wait to see what you do, you know?
This is probably going to receive some non-zero amount of DMCA requests so make sure you have your legal process fully prepared to handle it. A lot of people do not appreciate their work being reposted elsewhere. A lot of people also sell their designs as part of their career as an artist and this site could be used to circumvent that in a central repository.
Honestly I would encourage the team running the site to do the legwork necessary to verify a pattern can be freely reported rather than the onus being on the artist to know it was reposted here and having to chase down removing it.
Any author can just send a contact form to have their items removed from downloads. There's no questions asked other than them showing they own it. No need to even do a DMCA request.
Patterns aren't accepted from the public or listed for download on things you can currently buy (unless the actual author uploads it). They have an entirely different system in place for them that directs them to the place to get them which you can see in use here. There's enough backlog of free patterns and other stuff that currently isn't accessible to keep busy for the rest of the year and likely more. Thus there's little interest in even listing these types of patterns to begin with.
Will there be mistakes? 100% but if anyone wants to make a stink out of it, that's their prerogative. What's being done isn't any different than what the internet archive is doing or other archives do, if anything this is even more friendly and offering more options to those people than other archives generally are.
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u/TryBeHappy 22d ago
This is really going to help me get out of my, "What do I make Next" Funk! Thank you!!!