I originally made a template of my design based on my wife's corset, but I ended up changing most of it. Leather works very differently to cotton or synthetic fibres and there's less wriggle-room for adjustment and error, so creating an exact template makes everything else much easier.

After trying a lot of different approaches to create templates that worked well, I found tape-forming to be the most effective. I taped the form directly onto my wife, however, this would work fine on a mannequin. Lots of different tape-forming tutorials can be found on the net. The one I found most useful is this Body Armour (Tape-forming) Tutorial.

I began by covering her body in cling wrap (in Australia, saran wrap for the US folk) and then used duct tape to create a form over it. I made sure to cover more than I needed and I used a permanent marker to draw outlines of the design I was aiming for and to indicate cutting lines and where pieces would attach.