# A cutting plan is a puzzle scored in waste > Every panel on this plan has to run the same way up the roll, which removes almost all the freedom to rotate pieces — the metre figure at the base is the score, not the chair. August 19, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/upholsterer-cutting-plan A long rectangle, standing for the width of a roll of fabric. Six pattern pieces laid inside it — SEAT, INSIDE BACK, OUTSIDE BACK, two ARMs, PLATFORM — each with a grain arrow pointing the same way. The gaps between them are hatched. Along the base, dimensioned: 4.2 M. That number isn't a fact about the chair. It's a score. ## What is this plan actually showing? A whole chair's cover, cut from one continuous length of fabric, worked out before a blade touches the roll. Every panel the chair needs is here — seat, both faces of the back, both arms, the platform underneath — nested inside the width of the roll with the waste between them marked. Nothing about this stage involves cutting. It's entirely the thinking that has to happen first, because once the scissors move, the decisions are already spent. ## Why does every arrow point the same way? Because the fabric isn't symmetrical along its length the way it looks at first glance — a woven pattern, a directional print, or the nap on a pile fabric like velvet all read differently depending on which way they're turned. Lay one arm upside down against its pair and a plain-looking chair will show a visible seam of mismatched sheen or pattern the moment somebody looks at it in raking light. So the rule is simple and it removes almost all the freedom that would otherwise exist to rotate pieces into gaps — every shape has to sit the same way up the roll, whether or not that's the tightest fit available. ## What actually separates a good cutting plan from an average one? How little fabric is left over once six directional shapes have been packed into one strip at a fixed width. Two upholsterers can be given the identical chair and the identical roll and come back with different totals at the bottom of the plan — one arrangement finds a gap for the platform inside the shadow of the seat panel, another doesn't. 4.2 M on this plan isn't a measurement of the chair at all. It's a record of how well that particular puzzle got solved, and it's the number somebody has to be able to defend. ## Can I put a real upholstery firm's cutting plan on this? The layout itself, freely — a cutting plan is a method for solving a packing problem, and a method isn't owned by anybody. What is owned is a specific firm's actual printed plan, tied to their name and their job sheets. If a real firm's document is the point, ask them — that permission is part of the job, same as using anybody else's branded paperwork. If it isn't, an invented plan works just as well, and it can be drawn for the actual chair somebody's reupholstering rather than borrowed from a stranger's workroom. ## Does this only apply to chairs? No — the same puzzle scales up and down to anything cut from a roll with a direction to it. A sofa is the same plan with more panels. A car seat, a headboard, a single dining chair seat pad are all smaller versions of it. The plan can also be drawn for something specific and sentimental — the actual chair somebody inherited and is finally getting recovered, with its own real panel names and its own real waste figure at the bottom. ## Couldn't a machine just nest the pieces automatically? For plain fabric with no direction to it, largely yes. For anything with a grain, a pattern to match across the arms, or a nap that catches light differently depending on which way it's brushed, somebody still has to make the call a machine can optimise around but not fully own. That's the part worth sitting with: the number at the bottom of this plan is somebody's name on a decision. If the job runs over on fabric, the upholsterer who signed off on 4.2 M is the one who has to explain it to the customer — not the roll, and not the chair. [The same is true of a cutting list with zero margin for error](/stories/glazier-cutting-list), just for a material that can, at least, be nudged a little rather than cut once and finished. ## Does it print well? Yes, treated as a diagram rather than a photograph — flat panel outlines, hard edges, hatching kept coarse. The hatched waste areas are the thing to watch: dense diagonal hatching at real technical-drawing scale is exactly the kind of fine detail that [fills in once it's below the weave's floor](/stories/bold-shapes-survive-fabric), so it wants fewer, wider lines than a real plan would use. With three inks here — dust blue ground, cream line work, one orange — the orange is worth spending on a single thing that matters, like the grain arrows or the 4.2 M dimension, rather than spread thin across the whole diagram. ## How do I get one made? Describe the piece at [JustOG](/) — a real chair with its own panels, or an invented plan built just for the shirt. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped. Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop). Six shapes, one direction, one roll, and a number at the bottom that somebody has to stand behind.