How to figure out what pleats you want.

[Barb T]

Hi all,

I made the following post in another thread, but, because this is a tutorial, I'm re-posting part of it here.

Whenever you do this kind of PhotoShopping to see if a pleating looks good, you really have to know what the width of the stripes are in inches. If you don't know the width of the stripes, you can't actually know what the pleating will look like. When I do this kind of thing, I assume a pleat width at the hips of about 3/4-7/8", because that's typical for a guy's kilt. If the green stripe in the example at the start of this thread is 1/4" across, that leaves 1/4" on each side that's dark blue. If, on the other hand, the green stripe is 1/2" across, that leaves only 1/8" of blue on each side for a normal-size pleat. A very different look altogether.

Here's an example from a tartan design that I critiqued awhile back for ScotWeb. If you took a casual look at the tartan, you might think it would look great pleated to the green stripe and that you could pick chunks so that the kilt would pleat up like example "C" below. As it happens, the sett is big enough that this effect could only be accomplished in a box pleated kilt with pleats 2 1/2 - 3" across. If you made a knife-pleated kilt with normal-sized pleats, you'd find that the light color cluster is wide enough that the pleats would not extend out into the dark blue, giving the actual look of example A if you pleated to the green stripe. If you didn't know what the size of the stripes were, you wouldn't have an accurate picture of what the pleating would look like.



And you really have to take tapered chunks of the tartan (not strips with parallel sides) so that you can see what it will look like if the pleats taper between the hips and the waist. Even though pleats do not taper between the bottom of the fell and the bottom of the kilt, taper from the hips to the top of the kilt can eliminate a narrow color band along the edge of a pleat, and that doesn't look good. Here's an example of what I mean - the white stripe along the edge of the pleat vanishes in the taper - not good.



So - if you really want to see what the kilt will look like, before you can do the PhotoShop thing, you need to know how big the stripes are, and you need to account for pleat taper.

BTW - these same issues should be taken into consideration when someone designs a tartan. When I get the time, I'll make a tutorial posting on my take on the dos an don'ts of tartan design from a kiltmaker's perspective.