In general, the cutting pattern of the membrane structures is determined by dividing the complicated curved 3-D surface into several 2-D plane strip by using flattening technique. In this procedure, however, some discrepancies ore occurred between actual stresses of equilibrated state and designed uniform stresses because the material properties are not considered. These deviations can cause the critical structural problems, wrinkling or overstress, and thus a optimization process should be considered. In this paper, a new analytical method for determining an optimum cutting pattern considering material properties is presented. Here, iterative procedure is introduced to decrease the errors caused in numerical process. The optimization method proposed can diminish the deviations occurred by material properties and numerical errors, simultaneously. As a results, it is shown that the final stress distributions for the HP shell model are sufficiently near to design stress distributions, and it can be concluded that this method can be used to obtain the optimized cutting pattern of membrane structures.