Organizing kilt gear in a closet

[imbrius]

I love sporrans and have four decent ones. Other than that, you’ve described my closet almost exactly.

I have four but really only need/want three of them. I'd like to unload one but so far no one else wants it either - it's a tacky black evening sporran made in Pakistan. :/ Thinking possibly thrift store donation if no one else wants it.

[Miller6582]

Most of the accessories I have are just in a drawer, with the exception of my sporrans. I picked up a couple of unfinished pine boxes with slide lids, sanded, oiled and lined them.

[OC Richard]

I would be quite happy to have another sporran Bill, the trouble is, that after four score years of searching I have yet to find one that I like.

I have the opposite problem, I find ones that I like all the time!

But I have to ask myself "in the real world, how often will you wear it?" and if the answer is "not often" I have to exercise some self-control and not buy the thing.

I do pick up Ebay bargains "too good to pass up" from time to time. If such a sporran doesn't get worn I'll sell it. I have a strange aversion to collecting too many multiples of things. I recently did a major closet purge in which I sold over half my kilts, jackets, and sporrans.

[OC Richard]

I got to wondering how other folks store their kilt gear.

I'm afraid you would be disappointed in my storage approach!

The closet has my kilts and jackets on hangers.

On the shelf above is a 9 x 11 x 17 inch cardboard box with my other bonnets, hose, sporrans, and belts.

I have my "gig bag", a 10 x 17 inch zippered canvas boot bag that has my go-to sporran, shoes, hose, flashes, and bonnet.

That's it.

I wonder why I've not got a plastic bin for my Highland Dress accessories! Because I do for my Cosplays. For each costume I have a plastic bin, and everything associated with that costume gets chucked in it. When I'm off to a ComicCon I put the bin in the boot and know that I can't have forgot anything. I'm forgetful by nature and I'd much rather need to remember one bin than try to remember the dozen or more bits that go with a costume.

I do have a plastic "piping supplies" bin in which everything I own associated with the pipes get tossed. If I have to do any pipe maintenance I know everything I might need is in one place.

[OC Richard]

About displaying my Highland Dress, honestly the idea never occurred to me.

On a Highland piping forum somebody started a thread "how do you display your pipes?"

I was flabbergasted. I had to take a step back and ask myself "why does this idea seem so alien?"

I think it's because I've played pipes professionally for over 40 years and my musical instruments are my tools.

Thus the question "how do you display your pipes?" is like "how do you display your screwdrivers?"

I don't. The screwdrivers go in the toolbox and the pipes go in the pipe box. They're tools to do specific jobs, not nonfunctional objects of ornament.

And for me piping has always come first, Highland Dress being a necessary adjunct to playing the pipes in public. So in a genuine sense my Highland Dress is also a tool.

To the extent that when I was in the Musician's Union and writing off my piping expenses my Highland Dress purchases were written of as well, being a sine qua non of playing the pipes for pay.

[MichiganKyle]

Divorcing need from necessity is, I think, the key to all this. How many kilts do you need? How many sporrans, hose, shoes, bonnets, kilt pins, shirts, flashes do you really need?

For me and many traditional Scots will also think along these lines, two kilts(same Clan tartan), two kilt pins, two sporran belts(one silver chain--one leather), one tweed kilt jacket, one black barathea silver buttoned argyle(BBSBA), one sporran, one pair of flashes, one balmoral(most will not own a bonnet), one kilt belt, one SD.

Shirts, shoes, hose, ties, cuff links, etc., are mostly interchangeable with my saxon attire.

Job done.

I wear a kilt quite frequently as just casual clothing while at home or working in an IT environment, so my use case is probably a little different than yours. I wear a kilt for comfort and practicality more than tradition or fashion, but I do like to look reasonably presentable while doing so. It would look out of place to have a guy in a server room recabling a rack of equipment in full dress attire. I regularly rotate about 4-5 kilts with kilt pins I keep attached to them, probably about 8-10 pairs of hose, both kilt-matching tartan and solid flashes, three sporrans (brown, black, and rough utility), about four belts, and quite a few flat caps in different styles and colors. I try to specifically introduce variety into my outfit so it doesn't look like I'm wearing the same thing every day.

This all aside from my normal selection of shirts, ties, vests, slacks, etc. Organization items for these are very easy to find. I consider these to be a solved problem.

For more specialized use cases, I have several other kilts, a balmoral, and a pair of ghillies. These, I would say, are in a more medium-term storage situation. My uses for these would be quite infrequent. In longer-term storage, I have a small collection of kilt pins as well as "spare parts" - other sporrans I don't use as often, belts, buckles, etc. But even in storage, I like to keep them organized and in good condition so that if I want to wear one I know exactly where I can find it and that it will be in wearable condition.

So far my organization scheme has been to keep items in rough categorizations of boxes. But that has grown tiresome. Digging through a box of flashes to find a match to the one in my hand is annoying. Hence a desire for better organization and more specialized solutions than the level of just hanging hose on coat hangers.