Design Creation, Patterning and Hard Reality
The only limit of your final piece is your imagination. If you can picture something brand new in your mind, or a modification of something existing, you can close your eyes and see it there. You can work with that. From there, you can take the next step and imagine it unfolded flat, even roughly, or separated into its individual panels.
For example, if I want to make a simple leather cube, I will need six pieces of leather — all identical. That means I only need one template to create it. Each panel of the cube has four sides of the same measurement. If two panels are meant to meet edge to edge, those edges must be the same length.
In handmade leatherwork, this is crucial because you are stitching with the same number of holes on both pieces you’re joining. This is simple enough with a cube, but it becomes much more challenging when you move to something like a blazer, which must fit the human body. The principle remains the same — the same number of stitching holes must match on each side — but with advanced designs, you are often working with curves instead of straight lines.
In the most advanced cases, the two curves you are joining may have different shapes but must still be exactly the same length. This is where you can easily trap yourself — chasing overly sophisticated designs and getting stuck in the patterning process without producing anything. I’ve been there myself. My advice: start simple, and study thoroughly before moving to more complex levels.
From a technical perspective, when I see a design in my mind, I need to transfer that vision onto paper. I might begin with a quick sketch or jump straight into precise layout using grid paper — I prefer one-centimeter grids, found in standard student notepads. I buy inexpensive A4 student pads from Action, open them to A3 size, and if I need larger formats like A2 or A1, I align the grid lines from multiple sheets and tape them together with clear tape.
Once I have a workspace large enough for my design, I draw half of the pattern onto it. If it’s a one-off design that will be used only once, I use that drawing directly as my template. If the design is more complex or will be reused, I transfer it to the computer and redraw it in a vector program — I use CorelDRAW — to achieve exact precision.