A few thoughts on pleating to the stripe

[Barb T]

I just finished a kilt pleated to the stripe in the Royal Naval Association tartan, and I thought I'd post a couple of pics that illustrate a few things about pleating to the stripe.



This tartan has a huge sett (something like 13"). While it looks at casual glance that the tartan ought to repeat every red/white/red stripe, the intervening blocks are not identical. In reality, this is an ABAC sett, and the sett has to include the full tartan repeat.

If you tried to pleat this to the sett, you'd only get about 14-15 pleats into the back of the kilt (and each pleat would be about 6" deep). There are two alternatives. You could try "cheating" the pleats by picking up the right tartan elements at intervals of less than one full sett. This would probably work for this tartan, because most of the elements you'd want to pick up occur more than once per sett. You might have to have an occasional full-sett pleat that would be deeper than all the rest, but that wouldn't show except from the back side of the kilt.

The other alternative is to pleat to the "A" stripe that occurs twice per sett. That's what I did in this case. This also makes the pleat reveal and the pleat interior very different in color, so that the pleats have a cool flash of dark when the wearer walks.



You can also see why it's really really important to stand back from a test pleating to get the overall color effect. Even though this kilt has no purple in it, the back of the kilt from a distance has a purple cast to it because of the way the red, black and royal interact. You can see the same thing in Black Stewart kilts pleated to the stripe. I like it, and so did the customer, but you don't want to be surprised by failing to check!

And one last thing. I actually had enough tartan to put two more pleats into this kilt. I chose not to, because that would have made each pleat small enough at the waist that the narrow black stripes edging each pleat would have essentially vanished at the waist, putting the red stripe of one pleat against the red stripe of the next. That wouldn't have looked good. So, it always pays to do a test pleating _with the pleat taper_ to make sure that you don't lose an element that is crucial to the overall appearance of the kilt.