Fell Tilt: a thread for sydnie7

[Alan H]

First of all, "Fell Tilt" is a term that I made up. I'm sure that no other kiltmaker uses it.

What is it?

OK, these days when I make a contemporary KNIFE PLEAT KILT I invariably sew down the outer edges of the pleats. The process goes like this...

1. pour whisky
2. do calculations on paper...re-do depending on the stateof the whisky
3. lay out cloth on the floor. Hem if needed. Now, back on the floor.
4. chalk in over-apron shape, the under-apron pleat and all the pleat fold-lines
5. make the over-apron

and here's the key thing
6. sew down the fold-lines of the pleats from hem to waistline. These "fold lines" are where the outer edge of the pleat reveal lies.

Until recently I sewed a straight line, right up the fabric from the selvedge/hem to the waistline. That goes fast! Fast is good. Theres' just one problem. You have to taper the kilt from fell to waist.

OK, well, how do you do this? What I've done is set up the pleated part of the kilt flat on the table, and adjust the pleat reveals to what they're supposed to be at the bottom of the fell. Then I pin them in place. I doublecheck with a tape measure and make adjustments, usually trying for an extra 1/2 - 3/4 of an inch, just for insurance. Now I KNOW that the rump measurement of my kilt will be right. Now it's time to taper.

The way I do this is by moving to the waistband area...the "top"of the kilt. When I start out, all the pleats are exactly parallel to one another and all the pleat edges, from the hem/selvedge to the waistband are exactly the appropriate distance from one another. Now, I go one pleat at a time, and ooch the TOP of the pleat....the edge up by the waistband, over a little bit closer to the next pleat. How much do I ooch it? Well, I know how much because I've done my calculations, but here's an example.


If the kilt has 16 pleats, and I need to taper it four inches from hip to waist in the pleat area, then I have to "ooch" each pleat over 1/4 of an inch. 'zat make sense?

I then pin down the pleats, as I go, one at a time from left to right across the top of the kilt. I often go through one more time and pin the middle of the fell as well, and then I start topstitching down the pleats. But there's a problem.

Every time you "ooch" a pleat over a quarter of an inch in the fell, it makes that pleat not lie exactly straight up-and-down on the wearers body. A quarter inch isn't bad, but those quarter inches seem to add up, and once I put together a totally slap-dash camo kilt and by the time I was done the offset over on the far right side of the kilt was a good 2 - 2 1/2 inches. In other words, the fell "tilted" a good 2 1/2 inches on the far right side over by the reverse pleat. NOTE:I semi-saved this kilt by getting it really wet in hot water, and pulling it HARD on the bias, thereby distorting the cloth structure such that it more-or-less compensated for the tilt. Look at it this way...the kilt was an experiment and I gave it to the Hispanic guy who manages the cafeteria in our building and there's no way on earth he'll ever wear it. If it was PERFECT, he wouldn't wear it.

Anyway, that's "FELL TILT".

How to combat this pernicious problem?

two ways.....

1.) make a kinguisse kilt. The fell tilt starts adding up as you work your way from the left side pleats to the middle of the pleats, but WAIT! then you start over again on the right side! The fell tilt on the right side is exactly opposite in direction, and you meet in the middle. Each side is tilted, but because you don't carry the pleats in the same direction all the way 'round, the effect is minimized...it's only carried over half the circumference of the kilt, and the kilt looks fine anyway, because it's "tilted" the same on both sides..

2.) go back to step 6 above. Instead of sewing the pleat lines straight all the way from hem/selvedge to waistline, sew them straight from hem/selvedge to the FELL LINE. From the fell line to the waistline, sew at a slight angle , just a little bit (1/8th to 3/16ths inch) to the LEFT of the straight line you chalked in for the pleat edge What this does is tuck a little bit of extra material into the pleat, so that when you "ooch" later, you have a corresonding bit of cloth that's been taken up in the opposite direction of the "ooch"..

Result? Minimal Fell Tilt..

NOTE:this entire treatise is irrelevant to the X-Kilt or box pleat kilts, generally. Ditto for traditionally pleated and tapered kilts.

[Alan H]

Note that my method results in there being two lines of stitching on each pleat edge in the fell. I take some pains to lay them right on top of one another so it's hard to notice, but of course sometimes I miss.

An alternative would be to go backto step 6 and only sew the pleat edges up TO the fell line, and stop. Now lay your kilt out on the table and arrange your pleat edges in the fell area such that they don't tilt. Since the edges aren't sewn down, you have flexibility, here. This is how you do it in the X-kilt instructions. The difference here is that in the X-Kilt you have at most 9-10 pleats to deal with. In a knife-pleat you might have 20, so it takes longer.

The stinker is that you then have to go through and carefully pin those loose edges in place and sew them down *very* carefully, so that the lines of stitching match up ....right on top of one another at the bottom of the fell. You can hide little imperfections and misses with bartacks if you want. I always bartack the pleat edges at the bottom of the fell in my contemporary kilts...kudos to Freedom Kilts for that..

[sydnie7]

Gotcha. I kinda thought that was what you were on about with "fell tilt" but wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something completely different.

Having hand-sewn one trad kilt prior to making an X-Kilt, I knew about the pleat adjustment issue beforehand. I have only ever sewn pleat edges from hem to fell, then adjusted taper, then sewn from fell to waistband. As you say, with bartacking at fell there is so much going on that the start/stop goes unnoticed.

On the camo kilt, I went to the trouble of pulling threads to backside and knotting them, rather than reversing stitching to lock it. On the RK, I just reverse-stitched and it's not unsightly. Besides, that is how Union Kilts did it on the light blue denim RK we have, and they are "pros" right?

Thanks for the "concise" explanation

[Spc. Scott]

One of my AKs has that problem. It bugged me at first but I just got used to it.

Luckily for me I tend to wear them like one would wear jeans. Just throw it on and you're good to go.

[Smayniac]

I did both of my XK's to the instructions in the book, stitched only to the fell. While making Scooby's though, I wondered if it might not be easier to align the tapering if pleats were stitched all the way up. My XK has extra stitch lines catching the inside of the pleat material, but the fabric I use hides stitching VERY well; I had trouble when I wanted to tear out mistakes.

I'm thinking, after reading this thread, I may topstitch all the way up on Scooby's denim kilt and see what comes of it.

Bob