4.5 inch sett isn't big enough, so I want your opinion

[Alan H]

OK, I bought this stuff from the remnant collection at Fraser and Kirkbright, hoping to use it to practice pleating to sett before I started the X Marks tartan. It's pretty nice ply/wool 13 ounce. The selvedge is good. Well, when it came it turns out that it has a 4.5 inch sett. I bought 3 yards. Hmmm....you know, a 4.5 inch sett doesn't make for very deep pleats, does it?

GRRRRRR.

Here's what it looks like, after a bit of doctoring and patching together with MS Paint:



OK, if I pleat to sett or stripe I'm going to get pleats that are only about 1.75 inches deep, if I use a roughly one-inch reveal. Yuck. DOUBLE yuck. I don't want to pleat double setts (and get deeper pleats) because I don't want to buy more material. It's not like this is a special tartan to me, I bought it because it was cheap, to learn on. But I don't want to make an unwearable kilt out of it, you know? OK, so I stared at the material for a while and thought...what if I pleat one AND A HALF setts? Tht would be about 6.7 - 7 inches deep, then. Perfect...

I laid it out and it seemed to be OK. If you look closely at the sett pattern, and then look at the image down below, you'll see what I'm thinking of.



What do you all think? Thumbs up, thumbs down?

Kiltmakers, is there any downside to doing this?

[Alan H]

I'm going to have to count setts, or actually "pleat-repeats" CAREFULLY to figure out how many I can make if I do this, but it should eat tartan at the same rate that a 6-7 inch sett eats tartan. That means I should have about 22-24 pleats around me backside....just fine..

Then again, maybe I have my Great Kilt outta this, you know? At least it didn't cost very much.

[Scottish Chi]

I think you should make it with a 38/40 inch waist so if you don't like it you can send it to me!

I like the material and the way you have figured the pleating. I don't know how to make a kilt but the visual of the pleated pattern looks good to me. I would be happy to send you more material if you would like to make another for me for more practice.

Cheers! Bill

[cavscout]

I've been watching that material also for a while. Without the red stripe it looks a bit boring. I wouldn't let it keep me from making a knock around kilt but as far as a kilt to step out in probably not.

Can you go with a couple less pleats to give deeper pleats and use whatever's left to give you deeper reverse pleats at the aprons?

[Schultz]

Have you thought of trying your hand at a box-pleat, Alan?

[KiltedCodeWarrior]

Looks good to me Alan. But Schultz does bring up a good possibility by making a box pleated. Yuo could make fewer, but deeper pleats, to sett or stripe, and not need any more cloth (I think).

[Alan H]

Yes, I could box-pleat this, which is a thought. It'd have more box-pleats than one of Matt's kilts, more like about 12-14 pleats, but yeah, that would work just fine. Hmmm. I might have enough left over for a vest, too.....like I've got time to make a tartan vest?

Cavscout, actually to get deeper pleats and only pleat one sett, I'd have to make a smaller reveal. I could do that, but I'm thinking that I'd need more material because the number of pleats would go up. Also, I don't know that I want to hand-sew 35+ pleats into a kilt that I'm not "involved with" you know? If this were the X Marks tartan or the California tartan or MacNaughton, I'd do it....but it's not..

Just a note on sett size and pleat depth for anybody who's reading..... If you think about it, you can't just "make deeper pleats" when you're pleating a kilt to a pattern (the sett). The pattern, combined with the amount of "reveal" you want defines the depth of the pleat. Since the revealed part of the pleat is usually between 3/4 and 1.5 inches, making a 1/4 inch change in "reveal" won't significantly affect the depth of the pleats. It will, however, significantly change the number of pleats you have to sew! You can pleat double setts, which works fine, but that does go through tartan rather quickly. If you take a 4.5 inch sett and fold it in half, (which is analogous to having NO revealed part of the pleat at all) you'd only have pleats that are 2.25 inches deep. That's just barely acceptable, in my mind, and obviously you can't have NO revealed section of the pleat, right?

Barb says in her book that pleats less than 1/2 inch don't look good, and I'd agree with that. OK, so If I use a 1/2 inch reveal, then that means my pleat depth will be half of what's left of the sett.

4.5 inches minus 0.5 inch = 4 inches.

Divide that 4 inches in half and you get two-inch deep pleats. That's OK for a tartan skirt, but it kind of doesn't cut it, in my mind, for a kilt. Now, this is just "ME", you know? My 5-yard Holyrood has pleats which are 2.25 inches deep. That looks fine to me, but I don't think that 2 inch deep pleats is gonna work very well.

There's something else to think on, and that's the amount of work I want to go through. My hip (read: butt) measurement is 48 inches. OK divide that in half, because of course half of the kilt is in the aprons and half is in pleats, right? OK, so that's 24. If I'm going to cover that 24 inches 'round me rump with half-inch wide pleats, that means I'm hand-sewing FORTY EIGHT PLEATS!!!!!!!!!

Forget it!! No way am I hand-sewing 48 pleats. If I use one-inch wide reveals, then that 24 inches is covered by 24 pleats, which is just dandy. If I cover that 24 inches with 3/4 inch wide pleats, then I'd have 32 pleats, which his the very upper end of what I'd ever consider hand-sewing. But the one-inch reveals give me a pleat depth like this...

4.5 inches (sett size) - 1 inch (the reveal) = 3.5 inches
Divide that 3.5 inches in half to get pleat depth and you get 1.75 inches. YUCK. That's nowhere near deep enough to make a decent-looking kilt.

Note that a tartan with a 6-inch sett (the X Marks tartan is about 6 inches, a bit more) If you use a one-inch reveal, will have 2.5 inch deep pleats, which looks good.. If you use a 3/4 inch reveal it will have 2.64 inch ( or 2 and 5/8ths inches) deep reveal, which is starting to look pretty nice, to my eye.

[Alan H]

Have you thought of trying your hand at a box-pleat, Alan?

Huh....I'm liking this idea......

[starbkjrus]

Lordy those numbers made me dizzy.

I do like your proposed pleat to set and a half though.

[MacWage]

My "Jedi" kilt (See Greenville game pics) has a total pivot-to-pivot sett of about 4.5 inches. I did a 1.5 sett- 6 3/4 inches per pleat. For box pleats the outside face of the pleat is 1/3 of the total pleat with an ideal range of 2-3 inches (confirmed with Matt). Thus the 1.5 sett would give a 6 3/4 pleat with a 2 1/4 inch facing. This would look good, feel good, and be rather practical.

Now, I'm thinking of this material (dang it!) of myself.

A box pleat would work quite well and not be a HUGE amount of work. Now, back to working on my current project-> a box-pleat in "Green Stewart" sans the blue stripes-> I go it cheap, its wool, its practice, and the colors match my car (a Miata painted in Lotus Racing Green, Lotus Racing Yellow stripe, and red leather seats and door covers over black carpet (based on the Team Lotus racing cars).