Pro Tip For Making Window Patterns

Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. You know when it comes time to put in a filler in a window or to create a pattern, if you're gonna do stained glass or something like that, it can be a real trial and error proposition. I've got a great method that'll save you a time and you'll get it right the first time. Stay tuned. Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. If you wanted to create a pattern for this window and you're going to put in, let's say another stained glass panel, or you need to replace this and you need to put in a plywood blank, you could do trial and error and do a lot of measurements, or you can use this simple method to get it right the first time. Let me show you how it's done. Well, in this case, what we're going to do is create a pattern that'll make it fit in directly in the points of this octagon window. And this will be used later on to create a pattern for stained glass. We'll show you all that in another episode. All right, so the first thing you need to do is to put a piece of paper in the middle of the window. And what we're going to do is just use something that's bright so you can see easily. I'll tape it on with a little bit of painter's tape. Your second step is to use a stick like this. Now, this is just a piece of scrap, but it's approximately a quarter inch thick, three quarters of an inch wide, and I cut a sharp point on one end of it. In this case, the stick has to be long enough that no matter where I put it in any of these points, the other end is going to land on the paper. Now, you'll notice that what I've done is put an X and an arrow. And the reason I've done that, it tells me that whenever I use this to draw our pattern, that this needs to be out and that's the upside. So here we go. We're going to take this stick and we'll put this point right up at one of the corners. I'm always going to put the arrow up or to the left if you want to call it that. And we're going to land it on this piece of pattern paper. I'm simply going to take my marker and draw along the edge, keeping the point tight. There's my first point. I'm going to rotate to the right again. Notice I'm up and I'm going to go ahead and draw this like that. And we'll go right on around. Okay, now that I have all of these drawn here, just to make it easy for me to remember which is which, because it can get a little confusing because they overlap a little bit and it doesn't matter if they do. I just go ahead and number them. So I know this is one, two. All right, now that I've got that, what we're going to do is take this out to the shop and we'll put it on a piece of pattern stock. In this case, it'll just be corrugated cardboard to show you the results. We'll tape that on and then we'll use this to extend the points back, draw the points and connect them. Let's go to it. Okay, let's go ahead and make use of this pattern we created at the actual window. Now, a couple of things I want to note with you briefly. One, notice that I put an up mark on the pattern. You can get really off where this pattern goes. So I help myself by going in and putting a mark so I know that that's going to create the top of the window. Secondly, if the window shape was significantly different from the one that we used as a sample, let's suppose you're doing a transom window above a front door set. And perhaps it has an arch top or something like that. You're going to have to change the shape of the piece of paper so that your story stick will always land on it. So a long, narrow window is going to have a long, narrow piece of paper through it. So with that in mind, let's go ahead and make use of this one and let's get our pattern made. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to take our pattern. I'm going to fix it, in this case, to a large piece of corrugated cardboard here. I'm putting my up mark towards this way. So we're going to go ahead and just go ahead and re-tape this back on. It doesn't have to be precise. Just approximately where you know it's centered in the pattern. All right, now that we have our pattern set down, let's go ahead and use our story stick. And remember, we used our marks to say this side always up to the point and this side always out. So let's go ahead and begin with number one. That's how we marked it in the window. We're just going to line it back up here and we're going to go back out to the point and put a point right where that goes. Or if you want, you can simply put a V around that point. Let's rotate around. We're now going to go to the next position. Again, lay it in. Also, keep the point up against the edge of your template so you don't end up with a gap. Let's go ahead and just continue around. All right, you can see the result here. What we have is eight arrowheads that point to the exact point of where our story stick was. So our next step is to connect the dots. Now, you can either take a straight edge and mark a line and then cut on the line, or you can just use a straight edge and a utility knife and go ahead and cut it out. Well, I'm just going to cut out a step and we're just going to go ahead and use the straight edge. Okay, there we are. Well, look at that. We lifted out beautifully. One last thing we need to do to be kind to ourselves is to make sure that we mark this as the top of our template. All right, let's go ahead and take it back in and see how it fits. All right, let's give it a shot. Here's our blank to fill it in. Notice that we put an X at the top to indicate that goes up here. Here we go. We're going to put it in the window and then push it in the rest of the way. Look at that. Perfect the very first time. Hey, this could be used for all sorts of things. So like we said, if you need to put in plywood inserts for storm damage or to replace a window, or you're going to do a stained glass window like we'll show you in other episodes, then this is a great way to do it. If you found this to be helpful, won't you like it? And better yet, subscribe to our channel. Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay from DirtFarmerJay.com.