A day in the cutting room

The cutting room is the quietest part of the studio and the one where most of the decisions get made. It is also where most of the waiting happens.

Morning: relaxing the cloth

A roll of fabric arrives under tension. If you cut it straight off the roll, it will relax afterwards and every panel will change size. So the cloth is spread flat on the table and left overnight — sometimes for two nights with wool — before a pattern goes anywhere near it.

Midday: the lay

Pattern pieces are arranged into a lay that uses as much of the width as possible. This is a genuine optimisation problem and our cutter does it by eye faster than software does it by algorithm. The offcuts go into a bin that becomes pocket bags, facings and eventually the small goods.

• Grain lines checked against the selvedge on every piece
• Nap direction marked once for the whole lay
• Bias panels cut and then hung for forty-eight hours before sewing

Afternoon: the first one

Every new pattern is sewn once, completely, before anything else is cut. It is worn around the studio for a week. Roughly half the time something changes — a pocket moves, a hem shortens, a facing gets narrower — and the whole process starts again.