Pleating challenge #5: getting a precise pleating to the stripe

[Barb T]

Hi all,

The kilt I'm working on right now is a good one to show a strategy for making precise, repeatable pleats when you're pleating to the stripe and the stripe(s) nearly fills the entire pleat.

In the kilt below, you can see that the double blue stripes nearly fill the entire pleat, with only a little red color sliver on each side. And the pleats have quite a bit of taper, so the red nearly vanishes at the waist. If the pleats had a single narrow central stripe in a pleat with lots of plain color on each side, a little weeble or wobble wouldn't be obvious. But in this kilt, the red has to be really consistent from pleat to pleat, and that includes not only width of red but also taper on both sides of the pleat. A little weeble or wobble would be pretty obvious.

If you're faced with making pleats like this, here's a technique that I've found makes it pretty easy to do a consistent job. So far on this kilt, I've done 19 pleats, and I've only had to take out half of one pleat.

Start by doing the usual, and pin the pleat at and above the waist and then start the pleat at the hips, anchoring it with your needle. Before doing anything else, stretch the folded edge of the new pleat and pin the fold along the edge, checking to make sure that the color sliver on the edge matches the previous pleat. Pinning prevents the new pleat from rolling either toward or away from you as you're stitching - any roll will change the amount in the color sliver on the edge. It can look perfect when you start to stitch, but, at least the way I stitch, if it's not pinned, it can creep as you go along and looked crappy at the end.



Once the folded edge is held in place with a couple of pins, go back and pin the edge you're going to stitch. Match the width of the color sliver with the sliver in the previous pleat, and make sure it's a mirror image of the other edge of the pleat you've just folded.



Yeh, yeh, I know....pins. I use 'em. Saves me bundles of time in the long run! Let's not get into that argument again!!! ;-)