I know it may be out of reach for most, but AutoCAD and a large format plotter is the way to go if you are lofting your own patterns. I lofted the Guillemot from the book in about two hours. Excel is useful in that you can put all the forms in X-Y columns and then use the scripting function of AutoCAD to turn them into a SPLINE.

If anyone is interested, shoot me an email and I can provide more detail.