Modelling the manufacturing process in reverse has created widespread interest in academic literature related to the garment industry, where complex final surfaces are defined by the body shape for which the garment is designed. Starting from this final target shape, the challenge for garment manufacturing is to design the cutting patterns leading to minimum waste of material and easy garment assembly. Several attempts have been made to develop algorithms which “un-form” the final garment into several flat components, using the locations of highest strain to optimise the pattern of cuts in the initial sheets of fabric. Early examples of these approaches are reviewed by McCarteney et al. [14], and more recently in Wang et al. [15]. A simplified mass-spring system is commonly used to model the 3D surface, with a subsequent optimisation that minimises the elastic energy, distances between nodes or the change in local area. This approach is similar to the challenge addressed in this paper, but differs in two key respects: the model of fabric deformation assumes elastic behaviour, where sheet forming must be plastic; the final garment is assembled from several components, where the ambition of this paper is to design the process for forming a single component.