From Coat of Arms to Tartan: The Cadilhac Case.

[Macman]

Ah! From their website, I read that the minimum order is 4 meters, so I guess this is double width? Thanks for the great example for the asymmetrical sett pleat!
@OC Richard: Well, my face is not all that symmetrical, so I guess it's a good fit :-D

I know that you're the kiltmaker, and I'm certainly not, but isn't there a problem with double-width material and asymmetrical setts? Do you not have to cut the material, and then to keep the selvedge when you join the two pieces, the sett gets reversed?

[Todd Bradshaw]

I think he's right on that one. It would make an interesting design challenge that's probably best avoided.

Todd: Thanks so much for that preview, mighty great stuff! Is there a tool online for that?

As expensive as custom tartans are, I like to arm myself with as much info as possible before opening my wallet. First I open the tartan designer's preview in Photoshop and splice a whole bunch of them together to get a good idea of what a hunk maybe 24" square or so would look like. It's often a very different look from what the small preview showed - sometimes good, sometimes not so good. Then I have a Photoshop file I made that has everything in different layers to make the kilt cartoons. I can take the extended tartan preview that I made and plug it in as the new tartan layer. It's a concept cartoon, not a rendering - but it's certainly a lot better than just trying to picture the final product in my mind and hope for the best.

[figheadair]

I know that you're the kiltmaker, and I'm certainly not, but isn't there a problem with double-width material and asymmetrical setts? Do you not have to cut the material, and then to keep the selvedge when you join the two pieces, the sett gets reversed?

There's only an issue with double width materail and an asymmetric sett if one tries to make an 8 yd (or 5-6 yd) kilt with half the length of the material required. The simple solution is to find someone else who wants the materail too, cut it in half horizontallly which will give two lengths of single width cloth.

[cadilhac]

Thanks very much for bringing that up! This could have been a bad surprise indeed, as my feeble mind couldn't picture that in advance I got in touch with Scotweb, and they told me that the fabric is single-width, so it's not a problem at the end :-)

Again, thanks for all the amazing feedback, that really helped me have a clearer idea, and the design is now slightly changed as per the advice of @OC Richard:



Cheers!