Enlarged Sett

[Barb T]

Bottom line is that the number of pleats is governed by the sett. If you can only get one pleat per sett (either to the stripe or to the sett), then you can roughly divide 5.5 yards of fabric (5.5X36"=198") by the size of the sett to get the number of pleats possible (that's because the rest of the 8 yards will be used in the apron, underapron, facings, deep pleat, and inverted pleat).

So, for a sett of 15", you'd only have 198/15 = 19 pleats if you pleated to the stripe and a few less if you pleated to the sett. If you had an element that occurred twice per sett, though, you could easily have a "normal" number of pleats (because you would have an "effective sett size" of 7.5"). Depending on the tartan, it might be possible to pleat to the sett by picking up an occasional pleat at less than a full sett, giving you maybe 19 or 21 pleats. Depends on the sett.

So, bottom line, in general, a huge sett can introduce huge pleating problems.

Before I could give you any other specific advice, I'd need to know what you had in mind for a specific sett size.

And remember that you can't ask to have a sett size enlarged a specific percentage - the number of threads in a stripe need to be an even number for weaving, so that has ramifications for the entire sett size. So, although in PhotoShop, you can take a sett of 10" and make it 12.5", it's very likely that it can't actually be _woven_ that way. For example, the tartan that you show has some very narrow stripes that would be 2 threads wide in the version shown, but would have to be 4 threads wide in an enlargement. That would double the whole sett or change the proportions. You can't just have those white stripes be 1.25X what they are in the version shown.