How to figure out what pleats you want.

[AKScott]

So you want to buy a kilt, but you aren't sure how to have it pleated.

Great. I know of three options.

One is to ask your kiltmaker to pin the fabric up a couple different ways and send you a picture. I have never done this. I would expect to be charged a fee for the service, but your kilt maker will be using the actual cloth from which your actual kilt is about to be made. Hopefully you will find something like this in your email box:

http://www.xmarksthescot.com/forum/f...52/#post740696

Option two is to buy not just a swatch but some actual yardage. If you find a piece of doublewide in your tartan less than one meter long, it is likely to be priced like a swatch (under US$20). This you can drape out yourself, like here:

http://www.xmarksthescot.com/forum/f...tml#post947958

Finally, option three is to use an old Windoze tool. Find a picture of the tartan you are interested in on the internet. Push the "Prt Scr" button up near your insert and F12 keys. This copies everything visible on your computer monitor right now into your windows clipboard.

Next open a fresh document in MSPaint and paste.

Next use the rectangle select tool and outline the tartan only image you want to use. Press the "crop" button to make everything else go away.

Make sure the the rectangle selection is still active around the piece of tartan you want to keep and press "copy".

Now close that MSPaint document, don't save the changes and open a new MSPaint document. Press paste.

You should now have just the tartan piece you are interested in, situated in the top left corner of the new MSPaint document.

Next use the rectangle select tool to outline the pleat reveal you want to see, and press "copy"

NB: Your MSPaint document should look like this:



Next open a new MSPaint document, press paste. Press paste again. Now you have two pleat reveals, but they are stacked on top of each other. Click on the "top" one and drag it over to the right.

Push paste again. Now you have three, two side by side and the third stacked on top of the first one. Grab the one on the left and drag it over to the right. Repeat as needed. You should end up with this:



Or this, different tartan than the other images:



And so on.

[MacMillans son]

If you are computer savvy that would be fun, but I got lost after the second line of instruction

Any direct service kilt maker should be able to send you pleating options without a charge. It only takes a couple of minutes to fold and pin some examples.

Kilt retailers (those who sell kilts made by others) may be a different story though. I think that's reason #23 to work directly with a kilt maker vs. a kilt retailer.

But again, you've offered a good tip for those who like computers.

[English Bloke]

I've used both option one and option three. I think you've hit the nail on the head with makers and retailers. The retailer wants to sell you a Kilt. The maker wants to make you a Kilt that's exactly the Kilt you want.

I must admit, I preferred choosing from the pics the Kilt maker sent me to my own ham-fisted attempts with computer swatches.

It's still a good tip though and sometimes the only way. Cheers!

[Chirs]

Wow. My eyes have glazed over but that seems like a really cool method. When I have more time, I will try that, just for fun. Thanks.

[Spartan Tartan]

Very good ideas, especially to determine which stripe is most appealing (to the wearing) when pleating to the stripe. Thanks!

[MacMillan of Rathdown]

*****

[mookien]

AKScott, et. al.: A timely post. My brother and I are trying to figure out ways to pleat the Blaylock Annandale tartan (a new one). The ideas in this thread (especially AKScott's) will help. Thanks.

A not particularly great representation of the Annandale should appear below, but it's good enough to get an idea. You might want to stand back from your screen a few feet. :-)





There appear to be a number of places to pleat this tartan. The green over-stripe comes to my mind first.

Any ideas/suggestions would be appreciated. The actual sett size is 4 3/4".

[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.

[MacBean]

I'm not a kilt maker of course, but I do think it helpful to consider the overall color effect you seek in addition to the patterns. I've been especially enamored of the light blue in the MacBean tartan (it reminds me of my father's eyes). In the following pleating (not one of my kilts), it was possible to bring that blue out:

[mookien]

MacBean: I can't think of a better reason to bring out a particular color in a kilt. :-)