Freelance Pattern Cutter London

Freelance Pattern Cutting In London.

14). Finding and hiring  the best freelance pattern cutters in London is no easy task. There are an abundance of freelancers throughout London, but not all pattern cutters are the same.

There is no point in employing a swimwear pattern cutter if you want a tailored jacket pattern. Or using a childrenswear pattern cutter for menswear.

Most pattern cutters are skilled within a narrow range of genres, but can be totally lost when they are working outside their field of expertise.

The Right Pattern Cutter For You.

The importance of employing the right freelance pattern cutter for you or your brand cant be emphasised enough. They need to be have sufficient experience in the right product fields.

They also need to be able to offer you a range of services to enable you to take your designs to the next stage. The best freelance pattern cutters will be able to provide their clients with a whole range of services.

A good pattern cutter needs to communicate with the designer, the sample machinist and the factory.

Experience Counts.

The most important factor in choosing a pattern cutter is experience. It takes at least ten years to become a competent pattern maker. Having to work as a freelancer ensures that you encounter a very wide range of projects, with all types of garments. An experienced freelance pattern cutter should be able to tackle just about anything.

 Our Team.

We have a small team of very experienced specialist and multi-product freelance pattern cutters in London. While each  specialises in particular garment types, they are also able to deal confidently with multiple products.

Leading Fashion Centre.

London has long been a world  leading centre for fashion, with its fashion industry employing around 50,000 people. It accounts for around half of all UK jobs related to fashion design and garment development.

Fashion businesses used to be concentrated  mainly in either the West End, North of Oxford Street or the East End, round Brick Lane.  North London  had a thriving  fashion industry, while South London had very little.

Fashion Businesses Around London.

As a Freelance Pattern Cutter today,  work is spread much more widely around different areas of London. Many new fashion businesses and young Designers are located around Camden, Shoreditch, Hammersmith, Fulham, Tottenham and Brixton.

Manual Vs Digital Pattern Cutting.

Over the years there have been many technological changes that have altered the job of pattern cutting significantly.

By far the  biggest changes have been in the computerisation  of pattern cutting. Computers certainly have had an impact in the freelance pattern cutting world. But manual pattern making is still in high demand.

While I have always been a manual pattern cutter, the arrival of digital pattern cutting has been a major advancement with many great advantages.

The ability to store patterns digitally, to be able to print them off at the click of a button, and to send them to anywhere in the world is invaluable.

Digitalisation cant be beaten for efficiency and usefulness. Better results will always be achieved when using traditional manual methods, although it is possible to mix the two methods satisfactorily.

The Internet.

The other great advancement  has been the advent of the Internet, which has made it far easier to market  freelance services. Ten years ago the only way  to market as a freelance pattern cutter, apart from sending hundreds of letters or making hundreds of phone calls was to advertise in Drapers Record at significant cost and with little response.

Today 70% of my work is located in London, while Scotland accounts for 10% and the rest of the UK accounts for the remaining 20%.

 EMAIL   [email protected]

Pattern Cutting On The Stand.

Although I spent four years at college studying to be a Pattern Cutter, learning only really began when I started work as a Pattern Maker for Jaeger in 1975 – and had to work with patterns constantly.

Even then I feel that my progress in learning the job was considerably slowed because I was initially working solely “on the flat” rather than “on the stand”.

That is, I was working with a pattern on the table, according to instructions and theory rather than putting the shape on a mannequin and seeing what was really happening.

Pattern Cutting Experience.

When I started it was  easy to get a job as a paid Pattern Maker straight out of college. Today  there is a glut of graduates who do not have the skills or experience  that employers require.

The lucky graduates get to work as Internees with little or no pay and often long hours in order to gain the experience.

Pattern making skills cannot be picked up quickly, but takes  years of experience. The best way of acquiring the skills is to learn how to model on the stand in combination with working on the flat.

Pattern Cutting Skills.

Pattern cutting is a skill that requires many years of practise to achieve even a basic level of competence. Ten years experience is the very minimum required before you begin to be competent.  Once you have  the basic skills, then it becomes easier to pick up new related skills.

While some people may have an innate talent, pattern cutting is not an artistic skill like designing, where talent  can transcend experience to a large extent.

Pattern cutting requires an eye for detail as well as patience to make sure that all the pieces fit together correctly. Today I can provide patterns for any type of style, from swimwear and lingerie through to complicated tailored jackets and dresses.

Types Of Pattern Cutters.

There are two basic types of clothing pattern makers in the UK – Those that are more artistic  with flare, but little patience for precision. And those that are very precise and almost architectural in their creation of a pattern.

The latter  veer towards the tailoring end of pattern cutting. The former tend to be involved in more flamboyant, drapy styles. The flare Pattern Cutter is more likely to work in ladies wear while the architectural Pattern Cutter is more likely to work in menswear or tailoring.

Flat Pattern Cutting.

There are two distinct ways of creating a pattern, as well as variations in between. Some Pattern Cutters will draft their patterns on the flat, while others will model them on the stand.

The architectural Pattern Cutter is more likely to draft a pattern, while the flare Pattern Cutter will tend to model on the stand.

I tend to combine the two methods, although I think that modelling on the stand is essential in learning to understand how pattern cutting works and how the shape of the body influences the fit and hang of the garment.

Tailors nearly always use drafts to Create  a pattern, but while an experienced Tailor will know how to ignore the rules of drafting, an inexperienced Tailor will often not understand how a pattern work in relation to the body. He will often be too concerned about the drafting method itself which can be very  unintuitive.

Modelling On The Stand.

All Pattern Cutters should learn how to model on the stand rather than from a draft or an existing shape that is created on the flat, even if their initial patterns are poor as a result.

Obviously in a work situation you don’t have the luxury of experimentation in this way, so a combination of methods would probably work best.

When you work on the flat you are only guessing that what you are doing is correct. You are working on theory rather than reality. You may of course be very good at that, but it will never take over from the reality of seeing something on a mannequin or a body.

Pattern Cutting Courses.

We run a number of short pattern cutting classes form our London studios in Greenwich, for anyone interested in learning about how to make patterns.

The Best Freelancers.

It cant stress enough how important good professional patterns are. Some factories do supply patterns, but normally these are not made by experienced professional pattern cutters. And almost certainly they wont be experienced in the area of pattern cutting that you require.

We always use very experienced pattern cutters, highly skilled in their specific fields. Again, this is very important. It can cost you a lot of money if the patterns are not right, as you may end up paying for multiple samples. And if the shape is poor you will sell fewer garments and get many more returns.

We do offer pattern cutting workshops, but these have to be at least four hours long. As a start-up workshop I would suggest that they are used to create your specific design rather than as a general pattern cutting class.

If you use the workshop to create a pattern for your own design, you are able to have more input into shaping that design. The pattern cutter can create the patterns alongside you.

What is A Creative  Pattern Cutter ?

Many people would consider a  creative pattern cutter to be a more creative version of a general pattern cutter.

In this interpretation, a pattern cutter who works by draping  on the stand would be considered to be more creative pattern cutter than one who works primarily on a computer.

Although the computer pattern cutter also creates a pattern, they are not considered to work in as creative a way as the “toilist”, or the flat pattern cutter.

The flat pattern cutter on the other hand could be considered more creative than the computer pattern cutter, because they work manually rather than on a computer screen.

But in reality the term creative pattern cutter is used to distinguish between two different roles – The production pattern cutter and the creative pattern cutter.

The creative pattern cutter would create the initial pattern, working with the designer and the sample machinist. The production pattern cutter would then do any subsequent amendments and perfect the pattern to be factory ready.

In the past, these two roles would have been done by one person, while the factory pattern cutter may have adjusted the supplied pattern  to make it easier for the factory, or to suit their machinery or construction methods.

Creative Vs Production  Pattern Cutter.

As someone who has been both a freelance creative pattern cutter and a production pattern cutter for  over forty years, I find this division of roles completely unsatisfactory.

As a creative pattern cutter, the link can be lost from the first pattern to the final sample, because you are not kept informed of any alterations. So you could be making the same errors over and over again.

As a production pattern cutter you lose the creative side of the work as you only get to adjust other peoples patterns.

Most small fashion companies or designers would only employ one pattern cutter. Two pattern cutters with different roles would superfluous. And freelance pattern cutters tend to have multiple roles anyway.

Anyone considering employing a freelance pattern cutter would need to hire someone experienced  in both the creative side and the production side of pattern cutting. It is no good being able to create marvellous shapes if you do not know how to construct a lining pattern correctly.

“Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value”   ALBERT EINSTEIN

 EMAIL   [email protected]