A Monster of a Program

Bring glass to life.

Draw your own stained glass in Nessie, fill it with glass you can actually buy, see the finished panel lit, and print it at the size you will build it.

Start designing

800+ real sheets · free to look round

Sketch it, draw it, then drop the glass in

Rough it out freehand, lay the lead over your own draft, then click glass into each piece, all in the same place. Our tools are built specifically for stained glass: choose your lead size, its type, or copper foil. But never guess again.

Draft, then draw: Lead over the sketch you started from.
Glaze by clicking: Real sheets, dropped in piece by piece.

See how it works

A pattern you can print, at the size it gets cut

Every piece numbered top to bottom then left to right, the way a printed pattern is numbered. Cut the shapes out and lay them straight on the sheet. The cut list totals the foil and came it takes, in the sizes they are sold in, so it can be ordered from wherever you buy.

Print it: Numbered pieces, at actual size.
Ordered exactly: Foil and came totalled by kind.

Open the designer

Real numbers, not rounded-up ones

Counted from what is in Nessie today rather than what we hope it will be. They go up when the thing they count goes up, and not before.

Real sheets in the library: 0Real sheets in the library
Ready-to-cut patterns: 0Ready-to-cut patterns
Written lessons: 0Written lessons
Checks on every shape you draw: 0Checks on every shape you draw

Real glass, real color, from the first sketch to the final cut

Nessie renders every piece the way it will actually look when the light comes through it, so what you approve on screen is what you build on the bench.

A rendered stained-glass Loch Ness monster in streaky teal and green glass, set into a wall and seen from the left, as the light through it runs from morning to night — Streaky teals and greens, from morning to night

A rendered gothic-arched panel in dark blue, deep aqua and teal glass, set into a wall, with a shaft of early morning light falling from it onto the floor — Blues and teals, mapped to sheets you can order by the square foot

A rendered Art Deco half-round sunray fanlight in pale, medium and dark amber glass, throwing a golden pool of light across the floor at golden hour — Ambers matched against real manufacturer catalogs

A rendered star-in-a-square panel with a gold and amber star on deep aqua and dark blue glass, casting the star onto the floor in morning light — A gold star on deep blue, cut-line aware

A rendered Prairie-style sidelight in seedy clear, pale amber and green glass, with a long shaft of golden-hour light reaching the floor — Prairie greens and ambers around seedy clear

The Nessie panel in the workbench's Design view with Check on: each piece tinted by how hard it is to cut, gold marks across the narrow necks, and one sharp point marked in red — Check on: every piece tinted by how hard it is to cut, and each problem marked exactly where it is

A close-up of the Nessie panel's head, with a sharp point marked in red and gold marks across two narrow necks — Sharp point, about 10°: fine enough to snap off while grinding

A close-up of a thin sliver along the Nessie panel's back, tinted red, with gold lines across its narrowest points — Narrow necks: the gold line is the width measured across the glass

Know what will break before you score a sheet

Every piece graded on a cutting chart, from Easy to Impossible
Narrow necks, sharp points and tight inside curves marked where they are
Each finding says why it fails at the bench, and what to try

Turn on Check in the Design view and Nessie reads every piece the way a glazier would. It measures the narrowest neck across the glass, the angle of every point and the radius of every inside curve, then tints each piece by how hard it is to cut and marks the exact stretch it measured.

Each finding comes with the reason it fails at the bench and something to try: widen the neck, blunt the tip, open the curve out. Nessie never changes your design. The findings are yours to act on.

See how it works

Have a look around!

Explore our Glass catalog and Pattern library

Glass catalog

800+ real sheets, searchable by color, texture and opacity, and every one of them is a sheet you can actually order.

A wall of the real glass sheets in the Nessie library

Pattern library

50+ ready-to-cut patterns from first suncatcher to full window, each one a real drawing with its piece count read off the geometry and an honest number of hours beside it.

Shop

Cutters, grozzers, foil and flux: a short list, because we will only stock the ones we reach for ourselves. Have a look at what will be in it.

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