CUTTING OUT THE FABRIC AND JOINING THE SECTIONS: 5 hours

OK, so I laid the material out on the floor. Actually I swept and dusted my hardwood floor before I laid it out.Anyway, I read and RE-read Barbs section on how to figure out what to cut.

Length is 24 inches
Rise is two inches
Hem Allowance is 1 inch.......total is 27 inches.

So I Triple-checked to make sure I was cutting from the edge that had the twill lines running the right way, and lo and behonld, there was a nice strong line in the weave exactly at 27 inches. So I forged ahead and cut the material.

I didn't rip it, I cut it. OK, OK...Call me a coward. I CUT it. But hey, I had a nice straight line to follow, and a good pair of sharp scissors.

Now comes the NASTY surprise. I took the "other" side of the fabric and aligned it so that the twill lines were running the right way. I then tried to match the edges of the fabric so that the correct selvedge (such as it is) continues as a continuous line. AAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!! The pattern doesn't match up! It LOOKED like it was symmetrical all the way across the cloth when I looked at the whole thing, but it's NOT. If I lined up the crummy-selvedge edge, the first stripe in the tartan is fine, the next one is a sixteenth of an inch off, the next one is almost two sixteenths off and so on. 27 inches later, the last, big stripe is almost 3/4 of an inch offset!!!!

OK, allot fifteen minutes to stomping around, cursing and scaring the wife.

Then, since I had the tape measure out, I *HAPPENED* to measure the black lines that I was going to pleat to and discovered the 6-inch/6.5-inch anomaly.

MORE stomping around and cursing. Much cursing. OK, back to planning stage.

This time I just said, Forget it!!!.....I want a kilt with 24, 1-inch wide pleats around me ****. How much material will that take with my *surprise* 6.5 inch sett? Answer? 7 yards.

So I figured out....remember that the "setts" aren't the same, the pattern repeats every TWO "setts"......where I could overlap the pieces. Then I started counting setts.

1 yard for the over apron and first deep pleat.
1 yard for the under apron and reverse pleat.

Beyond that I need 24 "setts", so that I have 24 stripes to pleat to. Oh, and I didn't forget the one I'm going to lose in wastage when I join the two pieces. I'd better add in 3 more "setts"-worth of cloth *just in case*. I'll be steaming mad if I run out of cloth when I have nearly 3 yards left over, but can't use it. All right then. So that's where I cut. And cut I did. I COMMITTED.

Then I trimmed the second length of cloth to 27 inches in width.

Now, how to best join the two pieces?

All right, I confess. I used a sewing machine. I had to pin it three times because I could NOT figure out how to line it up properly. I spent about 20 minutes figuring out where best to join the piece so that any seams would be hidden deep within a pleat and the pattern of the sett matched perfectly. I had to pull/stretch one piece a little bit to get the pattern to align, of course. Once I had it as good as I could stand to make it, I picked a thread that matched as best as I could, and ran a line of loose stitching along the pieces to hold them together. And then I did another line of stitching.

Well, I blew it. I accidentally stitched the loose excess material down to the back of the main cloth with the second line of stitching. So I had to **very carefully** rip out 27 inches of tight machine-stitching. And then, so as to not mess it up again, I hand, blind-stitched the edge of the upper layer down to the lower layer. I must say that it's essentially invisible. I did a good job. This is exactly the technique I'll use for sewing down the fell of the pleats.

I then fired up my lady's sewing machine again and serged the raw edges inside the kilt and trimmed off the excess. The match is nowhere near perfect, but I think I can account for it when I make the pleats, and it will look fine unless someone opens up that particular pleat and looks closely, inside.

This was a lot of work, and I've never hand-sewed a 27-inch seam before. That hand-sewing took me about 40 minutes.

If 27 inches takes me 40 minutes, then each 8-inch long pleat should take me roughly 1/3 of 40 minutes, or 13 minutes to stitch up. Let's be generous and call it 15 minutes.

15 minutes times 24 pleats equals 360 minutes, or it's going to take me SIX HOURS to hand-sew up pleats.

Oyyyyyy, what have I signed on for, here?

TOTAL TIME SO FAR: 8 hours