Endangered Scottish crafts

[CBH]

According to that web site, at most 20 people earn a full time living making kilts.

Is that number ridiculously low, or do the same 20 people make kilts for the dozens of kilt shops in Scotland ?

[Troglodyte]

According to that web site, at most 20 people earn a full time living making kilts.

Is that number ridiculously low, or do the same 20 people make kilts for the dozens of kilt shops in Scotland ?

I would have said that 20 individual kiltmakers for the whole of Scotland is a huge under-estimate.

But if they count a manufacturing firm such as Glenisla who have a team as one maker, then perhaps that number is not far off. Most Highland dress outfitters no longer have in-house makers, and use out-workers who probably also have another income. The rag-trade has always done this, so the figures are misleading.

Sporran and sgian dubh making is another matter. Most retailers buy-in their stock from one or two (but mainly one) high volume manufacturer as white-label products (in the case of sporrans) and sgian blades are produced in commercial quantities by the cutlers of Sheffield in England.

I would say that the number of hobbyist sgian makers is pretty large - myself, I have made maybe a dozen over recent years, but I would not call myself a 'maker' in the usual way.

Personally, I think the figures give a fairly accurate reflection of the situation today, but the same is true for all old crafts and trades in our modern, mass-production, high technological world. There is simply no market for the old ways.

[OC Richard]

I put up a YouTube video a while back comparing a Scottish-made hand-stitched kilt and a US-made machine-stitched one, both made from the same cloth.

Both came in at around the same price.

Someone commented that machine stitching is necessary for large quantities of kilts, as an example mentioning kilts for pipe bands.

I pointed out that the vast majority of pipe bands wear hand-stitched kilts. I played as part of a Firefighter Memorial yesterday and there were members from a half-dozen Fire Pipe Bands. Only one band had machine-stitched kilts.

Kilt-making on probably the largest scale in history occurred in World War One, in which (by quick Googling) there were 111 kilted battalions wearing hand-stitched kilts. Add to that 112 non-kilted Scottish battalions with kilted Pipes & Drums. (We're talking over 90,000 kilts.)