MacBean tartan pleated to the sett question

[Barb T]

Hi MC Jack

As it happens, I just made a post in a different thread about the rules for pleating to the sett in a traditional knife-pleated kilt, and one of the pictures I posted is the MacBean tartan. Below, I've copied and pasted the relevant parts about choosing elements for pleating to the sett, plus added a couple pics of the MacBean pleating. Your proposed pleating violates some of the rules below. If you're not sure why, just holler, and I'm happy to help.

Traditional guidelines for pleating to the sett (as taught in The Art of Kiltmaking):

• A pivot must be centered in a pleat (or in some cases split down the middle along the edges of two pleats).
• Pleats must be a mirror image on opposite sides of the pleat containing the pivot (i.e., the elements chosen must be identical but in mirror image on opposite sides of the pleat containing the pivot).
• Pleats should be chosen so as not to lose stripes in the taper toward the waist (i.e., not make spearpoints).
• A prominent non-pivot stripe should be held along the edge of a pleat so that it is not lost in the pleat taper.
• The pleating must reproduce the tartan sett as closely as possible while still maintaining the rules above AND keeping all of the pleats the same with.

Here are a few examples of the rules above. In each case, the look is not achieved by varying the pleat width - the pleats are all the same size.

The red stripe in the kilt below is a pivot, which is centered in the pleat, and pleats are mirror images on both sides of that pleat. Ditto the double black stripe, which is the other pivot.



First example below violates the rules (losing a prominent stripe in the taper, making spearpoints); the second one does not:



And here's one with split pivots, but the pleats are still mirror images on both sides of the pair that split the pivot. And all these pleats are the same width - the pleating is not achieved by varying pleat width.



The result of meeting all these rules is that the tartan sett can rarely be reproduced exactly across the pleats at the hips (and if the pleats taper at all, of course the sett won't be reproduced exactly at the waist). This is what makes pleating a traditional kilt by traditional methods a challenge, particularly for complex tartans. Here's an example - it's close but not mathematically perfect:



And here are the pleat choices for the kilt above, in the MacBean tartan:



And up close, and personal, so that you can see where the pleats are:




And here's one (not mine) that violates all the rules that I use....



The pleating you've proposed doesn't meet the rules for symmetry. I'm happy to elaborate if the post above doesn't make sense to you. Just let me know!