The First Cut

The cutting room opens at six, when the light is still flat and honest. A hide is laid out on the bench and read the way one reads a page — for grain, for scars, for the places where the animal lived hardest.

Nothing is cut until the pattern has been moved four or five times. A centimetre in either direction decides whether a panel will hold its line for a decade or slump in a season.

We waste more leather than we would like. It is the cost of refusing to place a pattern over a flaw and hoping no one notices.

— The atelier