A stained glass panel nine feet (three metres) high, in the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Bristol, England
Strictly speaking, stained glass is glass that has been painted with silver stain and then fired. Depending on its thickness, this stains clear glass with a gold/yellow/brown color. This appears most typically in the golden haloes depicted in church windows. In general usage, stained glass refers to glass that is colored by added metallic salts during its manufacture to create a wide variety of colors. Early stained glass artists were limited to a very few primary colors, but today almost any color can be produced.
These colored glasses are available in many different textures—smooth, wavy, rippled, hammered, pebbled, or very rough. These different textures cause the glass to have light and color transmission characteristics that, even for the same color, can provide surprising results.
In conventional stained glass work, glass of different colors is cut into pieces, shaped by grinding and then assembled using lead, zinc, lead cames or copper foil and then soldered together to create windows, panels and/or lampshades incorporating colorful pictures and designs.
Stained glass is an art and a craft that requires the artistic skill to conceive of the design and the engineering skills necessary to assemble the piece so that it is capable of supporting its own weight and (for a window) surviving the elements.
After centuries of repetition and little innovation, stained glass underwent a major rennaissance of form. The impetus for this new modern glass was the restoration of thousands of church windows throughout Europe, destroyed by World War II. German artists lead the way, notable artists include Ludwig Shaffrath, Johannes Shreiter and many others who transformed an ancient art form into a contemporary art form.
Churches - Stained glass windows are often used in more traditional church architectures, especially in the nave, to depict various saints and scenes from the Bible. This was especially important when the bulk of the population was illiterate. See also icon.
Houses - Stained glass was particularly popular in the UK in the prosperous Victorian era and many domestic examples survive, typically depicting birds and flowers. Most of them rely on machine made patterned glass to refract the light rather than the more expensive hand-made glass used in church windows.
Public houses - In Britain, traditional pubs make extensive use of stained glass and leaded lights to create a comfortable atmosphere and retain privacy.
Free stainedglass patterns are also useful for making small projects such as suncatchers and candleholders, or larger project like panel lamps and full windows.
Online free stainedglass patterns are especially useful because they can be printed to the size that you desire using standard computer graphics programs - you don't have to scan them, it's already done for you.
The most ambitious stainedglass pattern is the 'Wisteria and Chickadees' window, with over 1500 pieces (I have made a smaller oval with fewer pieces containing the same design elements, also).
This kind of window, still in use in the Orient, found its most notable development after the advent of Christianity; but it was not until the birth of Gothic architecture, with its large window-openings, that the full value of glass as a transmitter of light and a polychromatic decorative material was fully appreciated.
As glass at that time was to be had only in small pieces, the glazier was compelled, in order to fill the window-openings, to make his lights a mosaic, that is a combination of pieces of glass of various sizes and colours worked to a given design by placing them in juxtaposition.
The windows were indeed poems in glass, "The first canto, reflecting the image of God as the Creator, the Father, and the giver of all good gifts; the second, nature, organic and inorganic; the third, science; the fourth, the moral sense; and lastly, the entire world".
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