Create little snippets of markup and save them to the "patterns folder." The pattern primer will generate a list of all the patterns in that folder. You will see the pattern rendered as HTML. You will also get the source displayed in a textarea.
You should be able to take the whole "pattern-primer" folder and drop it into your own project (assuming you're running PHP) BUT make sure to update the link element in the head of pattern-primer/index.php to point to your own CSS.