Free falconer's tool

Hood Pattern Maker

A printable Anglo-Indian hood pattern drafted with the classic Slijper canon: measure your bird's head once, and the whole pattern scales to fit. Fine-tune the beak opening and chinstrap, then print at 1:1 and cut.

Bird

Presets are starting points. Measuring your bird always beats a preset; head sizes vary a lot within a species.

Units

Adjust

Hood size: head width behind the eyes (62 mm)6.20 cm

With calipers, measure eye-to-eye across the widest part of the head, in millimetres. This one number drives the whole pattern.

Beak opening / chinstrap bar width6.20 cm

The opening must clear the cere and the corners of the mouth. Canon default = the hood size.

Chinstrap depth1.18 cm

Wide enough for eating and casting; not so low that the crop lifts the hood.

Nape trim (for Dutch braces)0.0 mm

Braces tighten the neck aperture, so Slijper cuts a braced hood a little higher at the back.

Brace slitsFor Dutch braces, the usual way to keep an Indian hood on.Topknot slitsFor the leather topknot strip (10–12 mm wide on a mid-size hood).Neckstring slitsThe original Indian neckstring weaves through the chinstrap; it also lets you snug up a slightly-wide hood.

Step-by-step making guide 3D-print a matching hood block

Print at 100% / actual size and turn off “fit to page”. Then measure the ruler on the sheet: hoodmakers report printers shrinking a 52 mm pattern to 48 mm. If it's off, scale the print until the calibration bar measures true.

Cut file: solid shapes and white lines are cuts (the white curves are the crown darts and slits), red circles are awl marks. After importing into Design Space or your laser software, verify one dimension against the blueprint before cutting. Hood leather (1.5–2 mm veg-tan) needs a Cricut Maker knife blade or a laser.

This sheet is 9.52″ × 9.67″, larger than one Letter/A4 page. Print on legal/tabloid or let your printer tile it across pages at 100%.

Making notes

Drafted with H.J. Slijper's hood canon (The Falconer, 1957) for a 62 mm head: the widest span across the head just behind the eyes. Measure your bird eye-to-eye with calipers; that measurement in mm is the hood size.
Cut the outline and the beak opening with a razor-sharp knife held square to the leather; bevel the seams and the beak aperture on the flesh side. Cut the two curved crown darts; they close when the seams are sewn, doming the crown.
Sew the front seams with waxed dental floss, edges butted (not overlapped). The band below the beak opening is the chinstrap; it must stay wide enough for eating and casting, and not sit so low that the crop lifts the hood.
Brace slits are drawn for Dutch braces (they stop the hood being thrown off). With braces fitted, Slijper cuts the nape a little higher; use the nape trim slider. Adjust slit positions to your brace style before cutting.
Fit check: wet the beak-opening edge, put the hood on, and watch the cere and the corners of the mouth; trim a sliver at a time until nothing touches. If an eye area rubs, dampen it and dome it outward over a rounded dowel. Make a plain test hood before tooling or decorating one.
A hood that fits badly stresses the bird; never leave one on that touches the eyes, cere or mouth.
Leather for this size: Veg-tan tooling calf (kip), 4–5 oz. Vegetable-tanned only; never chrome-tanned. Kangaroo or soft calf for the topknot and piping.

Fit is welfare

A hood is only right when the bird sits quietly in it: full darkness, clear eyes, free cere and mouth, room to cast. Make a plain test hood first, fit it on the bird a sliver at a time, and only then cut your good hide. Every bird's head is different; Slijper drafted this canon from seventy hoods precisely because no single traced pattern fits them all.

Pattern drafted after H. J. Slijper, “A Tailor's Problem in Falconry”, The Falconer (1957), published so falconers could make their own hoods. Size presets compiled from the Rollins/Western Sporting block chart, the Watzke block & hood chart and published chinstrap tables. Starting points, not gospel. If you have corrections, let us know.