Complete the outfit

[DWFII]

Look for a nice used Harris tweed sports coat that you can convert to a kilt jacket. You don't even need to do all the piped gauntlets, epaulettes, or even silver/pewter buttons. In a nice neutral colour such as some of the rich browns or even a charcoal, you'd have the makings of a nice dinner ensemble. Wear black or brown leather accessories and any black or brown (hopefully matching your sporran and belt) dress shoes will work fine.

I'm converting a green-grey Harris tweed jacket and I'm in way over my head, but as long as I don't get too fancy I can pretty much see what needs to be done.

For what? $15.00? you can end up with something that would probably cost at least ten times that much and is very very credible.

BTW, don't dismiss doing some of this yourself---making a belt is dead easy. I got a 2-1/2" brass buckle from Ocannee (sp?) for $15.00 and the belt blank itself for a little more. I made myself a brown one and a black one. The black one was the hardest as it has a big semi-dressy pewter buckle and I had to do some figuring and wire bending to make it work. But the over all cost was still below $75.00 (with the buckle costing two-thirds of that.)

I also made both of my sporrans...The brown one right from the pages of Thompson's book and the goat hair dress sporran from my own imagination.

And if you look at some of the vintage photos, you can see a whole range of options throughout time. That gives you options--for example, a good many people would shudder to add a non-matching waistcoat to a kilt jacket but it was done all the time in times past. There's actually a whole lot of flexibility that comes with honouring Traditional conventions.