Another daywear outfit, featuring a new kilt in Lochcarron's Niagara Tartan

[OC Richard]

That's a very nice tartan!

I do tend to like blue tartans.

I have a quirky and much-flawed book

World Tartans
Iain Zaczek
2001, Collins & Brown, London

which has a tartan that looks roughly similar called Niagara Falls which the author calls "a modern trade tartan".

The differences between the tartan they show and your kilt could be just another of numerous errors in that book. (In some cases the computer-generated illustration has errors, in other cases it's a different tartan altogether.)

About colours to co-ordinate with that kilt, I've seen photos of Glen wearing brown and/or tan tweed jackets which would probably look fantastic. The colour-theory behind it is that blue and orange are complimentary colours, brown being a very dull orange.

My old Pipe Major wore a lovely brilliant turquoise Anderson tartan kilt and he invariably wore blue jackets with it. He even had a bespoke Royal Blue Argyll jacket & waistcoat. It was a bit too much blue, seemed to me.

About the leather straps on kilts, I've been wearing kilts for 45 years and I've got very used to the usual thickness of the leather used. I recently got a USA Kilts kilt and I don't care for the uber-thick stiff straps. It's difficult to shove the left-side one through the slot in the kilt, and difficult to shove all of them through the buckles. It makes dressing and adjusting the kilt more difficult than it ought to be. I've worked the leather to make the straps more flexible, though they're still far too thick.

I'm planning on switching them out for normal straps. I might make my own, from brown leather, just to be different.