Endangered Scottish crafts

[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.)