After nearly a month of not touching it, I got back to work this weekend. I think I should re-name this thread "Building a Kilt for the Busy Working Hack".

A couple of weeks ago I went to JoAnnes' fabric and bought some light, red cotton for a liner. I washed it, and it's been sitting around for three weeks. OK so that took me something like an hour.

This weekend I:

1. Cut out the cotton for the liner and joined the two pieces so it's long enough. I then serged the bottom edge of it so it wouldn't unravel and folded it over 3x at the top edge to form the "load bearing" part of the waistband. I then pinned and stitched it to the inside of the kilt. Most of all this work was machine-sewing.

2. OK, I cut out and joined the pieces of tartan for the waistband (joined them by hand), taking great pains to match the pattern on the over-apron. I then pinned that down and machine-sewed it into place. I folded it over and pinned the inside, which I will finish by hand-sewing this week (I hope)

3. I made a couple of buckle straps from tartan (mostly by machine). I've decided to make the left hand buckle an INSIDE buckle a la Matt Newsome. I'm debating on whether to go with two or three buckles. The nature of the tartan means that the placement of the lower buckle on the right side is going to result in something that doesn't look that hot, I think, so I might stop with two.

All up, this was about 4 hours of work, so 5 more, including purchasing the liner and washing it.

TOTAL: approximately 61 hours, but I'm closing in on a finished kilt!