When John speaks of "cheating the pleats" he is describing a way of pleating to the sett without necessarily having to include a full repeat of the sett in each and every pleat.

As this is a technique used when pleating certain tartans with a large repeat to the sett, and pleating to the sett did not come about until the very end of the nineteenth century, therefore there are no nineteenth century examples (that I am aware of) of kilts pleated this way.

In terms of pleating to the stripe, I suppose one could apply the same term to cases where a kilt was pleated to a stripe that repeated more than once per sett repeat. In this case there are many different examples of Black Watch tartan kilts (and any sett based on Black Watch) where the stripe pleated to is repeated twice per sett so that every pleat contains only half of the sett repeat.

Ordinarily, in a kilt pleated to stripe, each pleat would contain a single repeat of the sett.