I bought a £5 sewing machine and never stopped.
Eight years, one bedroom, a garage at the bottom of a garden, and a jumble sale on Tuesdays. This is why the patterns exist.
A £5 machine and no plan.
2017. I was buying and selling charity-shop clothes on Depop. Then one day I found a sewing machine on the shelf for £5 and bought it on a whim. No fashion school. No intention of building a brand. I just wanted to make stuff for myself.
I started cutting T-shirts in half and stitching them back together. I called it Halfnhalf Threads. I was deep in the parkour world at the time — part of a team called Brewman — and that’s who I was making things for. My friends.
Every day of those early years was spent in the bedroom, or in summer I’d move the whole studio down to the garage at the bottom of the garden. No air conditioning. Fabric, a machine, and whatever was on the speakers.
Tuesdays at the warehouse.
50p a pair. £20 filled the bag. I’d skate up to the local jumble sale in a warehouse and that would last me a week. Nobody else had found the spot.
The really good pairs went back on Depop. The rest became fabric. I’d take the pieces I couldn’t sell and construct entirely new garments out of them — every one 1/1, every one an experiment.
Then I found patchwork denim, and something clicked. The rough edges. The layering. The idea that something discarded could become architectural.
The name was honest about not knowing.
The name came from a conversation with my friend Tom Adams. I 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 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 rough, loose edges. The beauty in the unfinished.
Nobody taught me any of this.
No fashion school. Every technique arrived at through experimentation and failure, and about four years spent just working out what the words meant. Not wasted years — they made me focus on everything surrounding the clothes. But four years is a long time to spend confused.
If I’d had these tools 7 years ago, I wouldn’t have spent 4 years just figuring out what everything meant.
That’s the whole reason the patterns exist. Two years ago I’d have laughed at the idea — it felt like giving away the blueprints to the garments I was trying to sell. Then I realised the consumer and the maker are two different people, and putting the tools in someone’s hands doesn’t diminish the work. It multiplies it.
Not a pattern. A set of routes through one.
I was releasing a new pattern every few weeks, and then I stopped and thought about what was actually happening. People were making a replication of what I’d made. It’s great to see someone build your exact garment in your exact recommended fabric — but it isn’t theirs.
So the patterns changed. Every Roughcut pattern is now a set of pathways rather than one fixed outcome, and the choices split into two kinds.
What you want it to be
Pleats or no pleats. Which buckle. Which yoke. Choices with no right answer — they’re about the garment you actually want, not about how good you are.
This is where two people build the same pattern and don’t make the same thing.
What you can do yet
Back pockets. The routes through a waistband. Some pathways are simply harder than others, and the pattern tells you which.
So the same pattern has a base-level route and a fully detailed one. You buy it once and come back to it as you get better — learning on a tool that already feels familiar, instead of starting over on something new.
What you get isn’t a pattern. It’s the full understanding of how a whole garment is constructed, with the routes laid out so you can go as deep as you’re ready for.
I hadn’t seen anyone do it this way. It turns something that’s usually a base-level item you copy into a way to tell your own story — and to actually build your own knowledge rather than following along.
The Aero Jacket
Every detail on it is pulled from a real flight jacket somewhere in history. You choose the collar, you choose the hem — and then you go further and rework the back panelling and the pleats. A modern take on the archive that still keeps the core of the thing intact.
- Collar or fishtail hem
- Back panelling
- Back pleats
- Lining and hardware
The Keystone Denims
It teaches the fundamentals of selvedge denim — where to buy the fabric, what hardware to get, and the whole construction on film. The course walks the entire process, showing the different seams and letting you build them several different ways.
- Buckle choice
- Yoke variants
- Back pocket variants
- Seam construction
Someone posts theirs and you think: he did it completely differently.
That’s the bit I didn’t plan for. The WhatsApp group and the Discord mean people show what they’ve made and see everyone else’s routes through the same pattern. That’s the whole point of it.
History as material
Archaeology, ruins, architecture, Renaissance art, military lineage. Not as decoration — as a reason for the garment to exist.
Utility that lasts
MA-1 bombers. Workwear selvedge. Modular jackets. Built because it should function perfectly, and be worn for life.
The world as a studio
Italy. Egypt. Thailand. Berlin. Each trip becomes a garment — sourcing lining in the country, sublimating artwork from the history of a place.
Construction as storytelling
The stitching, the hardware, the panels — each one is a sentence. You’re wearing a story, not a product.
Jack
FounderDesign, patterns, content, community, strategy. All of it, and for years all of it alone.
Gio
Pattern design partnerI put up a story asking if anyone could help spread the load on the CLO3D work. Gio answered, we hit it off instantly, and he’s been working alongside me for a year now. He’s from Chile, and he speeds up everything.
Vince
Tutorials and editSame story — I found him on TikTok and messaged him. He edits the tutorials, and he genuinely cares about what he’s doing, which is the whole reason they’re watchable.
Calling it a pattern company is genuinely an insult to the last 8 years of my life.
An art outlet, with a sewing course built onto the side.
Both parts matter equally, and not because of money. The patterns are a way for someone to start their own creative journey. The art is the reason the journey is worth taking at all.
The front of what I do has always been whatever I want to do that week. 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.
Start with one pattern. See where it takes you.
The free builds are the same system as everything else — the same routes, the same films, the same group on the other end. Nothing to lose by trying one.