Making jocks & consequent waste

This is a side of leather, in other words, half a cow. It's pretty ordinary stuff - "velvet cow" from Korea. It's garment weight, with some refinishing, probably b or c grade - I'm not sure I didn't buy it. I get sent the materials to make for Lucrezia & DeSade. I need to go over a hide first in good light to check for imperfections - marks/holes/scars. Sometimes when marking/cutting these can be missed because of the angle of the light.
A hide of leather is irregular and every one is different - you have to plan the marking/cutting for each hide seperately. Cutting small pieces like for these jockstaps is quite easy as you plan as you go and can cut around the imperfections.This also makes for less waste as you can fit the pieces around each other, and the stretchy belly sections of the hide can be utilised for the waistband lining sections of these jocks.
Another note, each jock needs to be cut from the same area of the hide as the quality and grain of the leather can differ across the hide.

The next images show the jigsaw puzzle that cutting leather becomes. I try to fit the pieces together as efficiently as possible to reduce the area of the gaps between the pieces and utilise as much of the usable leather as possible. Cutting displaces the waste and the third image shows the waste alone.


As I go neatly cut pieces build alongside the piles of waste.

When making, more waste is produced.
Small triangles of leather are cut from corners to enable turning through (above, cut from where the leg elastic joins to the leg straps), and long strips are cut away from the waistband lining (below).

The end product is a pile of jockstraps (10 in total), shown here alongside the consequent waste from cutting and making them. There's a few off-cuts of elastic also, and the last picture shows the everything left over put in a box - the scraps as well as the order forms and the packaging that was used to send the trims/labels for the production.