Pleat to sett layout question, please help!

[Eric Peterson]

Here are a couple of pics of my current project. Do I have the layout correct for pleat to sett? Help please....and thanks!

[Wompet]

You do have it pleated to the sett, yes ... but having a stripe (in this case the undercheck) edging the pleats is a bit disconcerting. In fact, Barb and Elsie recommend against it in The Art of Kiltmaking. Can you either (a) slide that stripe towards the center of the pleat, or (b) reduce your pleat size (so the visible effect of the 'edged' pleats is reduced)?

[george7]

There pleats should be much deeper. If you're trying to make a traditional kilt, think about 1/2" to 5/8" show per pleat.

[Eric Peterson]

OK, I think I get it. you take the identical pattern from the corresponding sett and lay over. So 1 one complete sett makes up each pleat but bumping over one "line" for each pleat. What? Well here is the pic.... I split the open red space in half....is this correct?
Thanks.

[Barb T]

Technically, yes, you have mimicked the tartan in the pleats, but, when you pleat to the stripe, the pleats should be mirror images on opposite sides of a pivot, for example:



or



In the photos above, you'll see two variants of making sure that pleats are mirror images. In the top kilt, one pivot is in the center of one of the pleats and the second one lies between two pleats. In the second kilt, both pivots lie between two pleats. But, in each case, the pleats are mirror images on each side of the pivots. And that would be true regardless of the width of the pleats.

[Eric Peterson]

Thanks Barb T., so actually the pleat edge does not line up with a pattern edge? It would be so much easier to line up. I definitely have not even scratched the surface of the kilt making world, should have taken the blue pill.

[Barb T]

As you can see in some of the pleats in the two pics above, the pleat edge _does_ lie parallel to the pattern edge (e.g., the blue/black, and yellow/blue pleats in the first kilt and the triple white in the second kilt). What to do with a particular pleat depends on whether you have something that can be centered (a stripe or a color boundary), how much taper there is in the pleat (so that you don't lose elements toward the top of the pleat), how many little stripes you have to cope with, etc.