I bought a £5 sewing machine and never stopped.
This is the story of Roughcut. Eight years, one bedroom, a garage at the bottom of a garden, and a jumble sale on Tuesdays.
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A £5 sewing machine from a charity shop. No plan. No fashion school. Just curiosity and a bedroom.
2017. I was buying and selling charity shop clothes on Depop — a standard depot hustle. Then one day I found a sewing machine on the shelf for £5. I bought it on a whim. I had no real intention of building a brand. I just wanted to make stuff for myself.
I started cutting T-shirts in half and stitching them together. I called it Halfnhalf Threads. At the time I was deep in the parkour world — part of a team called Brewman — and that's who I was making things for. My friends. My community.
Every single day of those early years was spent in the bedroom, or in the summer I'd move the whole studio down into the garage at the bottom of the garden. No air conditioning. Just fabric, a machine, and whatever was on the speakers.
Tuesdays at the warehouse.
50p a pair. £20 filled the bag. A skateboard up the road. Nobody else had found the spot yet.
Levis at 50p. Every Tuesday. I had the whole spot to myself for a long time.
The really good pairs I'd sell on Depop. The rest became fabric. I'd skate up to the local jumble sale in a warehouse, fill a bag with £20 of jeans, and that would last me a week. When the bins refilled, I'd go again. It was my income. My process. My obsession.
Patchwork denim was everything.
I'd take the lower-grade pieces I couldn't sell and construct entirely new garments out of them. Every single piece was 1/1. Every one was an experiment. Every one was mine.
Then I found patchwork denim. And something clicked. The rough edges. The layering. The idea that something discarded could become something architectural.
The name came from a conversation with my friend Tom Adams. I always wanted to break the mould of something sounding too gimmicky — too much like a friends' clothing brand.
I settled on Roughcut mainly because I knew my projects and finished garments looked amazing, but I didn't quite know all the techniques. I didn't really know how I was getting to the end result. The name was honest about that. The rough, loose edges. The beauty in the unfinished.
And then as time went on, I found a love for artwork deeper than I'd expected. Old Vivienne Westwood. Paintings as fabric. I started mixing patchwork denim with historical artwork — blurring the line between history and something you could wear.
Relics from the past. Crafted in the present.
Every garment is designed to outlast fashion. Every piece is built with the weight of something that should exist for a long time.
The garments pull from archaeology, ruins, architecture, Renaissance art, and military lineage. Not as decoration. As a reason for the garment to exist.
MA-1 bombers. Workwear selvedge denim. Modular jackets. Everything is built because it should function perfectly. Built to be worn for life.
Italy. Egypt. Thailand. Berlin. Each trip becomes a garment. Sourcing lining in the country. Sublimating artwork from the history of a place. Making fashion as slow as it should be.
The stitching, the hardware, the panels — each one is a sentence. When you wear a Roughcut garment you are wearing a story, not a product.
Two years ago I would have laughed if you told me I'd be making patterns. It felt like giving away the blueprints to the garments I'd been trying to sell.
I'd spent years worrying about protecting the process. The techniques. The systems I'd built through trial and error without ever going to fashion school. Every single thing self-taught. Every technique arrived at through experimentation and failure.
Then I realised: the consumer is totally different from the maker. And putting the tools in people's hands wouldn't diminish what I was doing. It would multiply it. The patterns became the most generous thing I'd ever done with the brand.
If I'd had these tools 7 years ago, I wouldn't have spent 4 years just figuring out what everything meant.
Not wasted years. Those years made me focus on everything surrounding the clothes — packaging, campaigns, drops, photography. But I can save someone else from that confusion. I can give them a faster path in without taking anything away from the journey.
A charity shop find. No plan. Just cutting T-shirts and learning by doing. Halfnhalf Threads begins.
50p Levis. Skateboard up the road. Patchwork denim discovered. The real work begins in the garage.
19 January 2019. The name is chosen. The brand launches. 1/1 patchwork denim pieces. Every garment a relic.
Historical artwork sublimated onto outerwear. Travelling the world to source lining locally. Sewing as cultural translation.
The blueprints go public. The Aero Jacket system. The Keystone Denims. A skill level 1–5 learning ecosystem built from the ground up.
1,200+ members. Gio joins as design partner. Vince runs tutorials. The whole thing starts working as a system.
Patterns. Community. Art. Travel. Education. The haberdashery vision. All of it growing together.
For years I did everything alone. Then I learned that the right people around you is what makes everything tighten.
Roughcut is an art outlet. With an extended pattern and sewing course built onto the side.
Both parts are equally important. Not because of money. Because the patterns are a way for people to actually start their own creative journey. And the art is the reason the journey matters at all.
The forefront of what I do in Roughcut has always been whatever I want to do in the moment. Action figures. Websites. Films. Travel garments. Archaeology-inspired outerwear. Sewing tutorials filmed on a domestic machine in a Thai hotel room. All of it is Roughcut.
The invitation
Start with one pattern. See where it takes you.
Every person who has built a Roughcut garment has become part of something. A community of people who make things with intention, with care, and with their own story to tell.