First Trad Kilt: an ongoing thread

[Alan H]

After nearly a month of not touching it, I got back to work this weekend. I think I should re-name this thread "Building a Kilt for the Busy Working Hack".

A couple of weeks ago I went to JoAnnes' fabric and bought some light, red cotton for a liner. I washed it, and it's been sitting around for three weeks. OK so that took me something like an hour.

This weekend I:

1. Cut out the cotton for the liner and joined the two pieces so it's long enough. I then serged the bottom edge of it so it wouldn't unravel and folded it over 3x at the top edge to form the "load bearing" part of the waistband. I then pinned and stitched it to the inside of the kilt. Most of all this work was machine-sewing.

2. OK, I cut out and joined the pieces of tartan for the waistband (joined them by hand), taking great pains to match the pattern on the over-apron. I then pinned that down and machine-sewed it into place. I folded it over and pinned the inside, which I will finish by hand-sewing this week (I hope)

3. I made a couple of buckle straps from tartan (mostly by machine). I've decided to make the left hand buckle an INSIDE buckle a la Matt Newsome. I'm debating on whether to go with two or three buckles. The nature of the tartan means that the placement of the lower buckle on the right side is going to result in something that doesn't look that hot, I think, so I might stop with two.

All up, this was about 4 hours of work, so 5 more, including purchasing the liner and washing it.

TOTAL: approximately 61 hours, but I'm closing in on a finished kilt!

[Alan H]

BTW, I bought 3 yards of the inexpensive gray remant polyester/wool tartan from Fraser and Kirkbright. They've had it for a while. I actually like the tartan and I've wanted a gray kilt so this will work out. When I'm done with this one I'm going to mostly machine-sew up a 6 yarder out of that tartan, but pleat it to sett. The current one is pleated to stripe. Once I've got that done, it's on to the 6 yard X Marks tartan kilt, pleated to sett....

That or I'll give up and send it to Rocky!

[Southern Breeze]

Thanks for the update. Is it too early to start jonsing for pics?

[Alan H]

IT'S DONE!

Yup, I went for it yesterday and last night and spent 6 hours doing the following...

**hand stitching the inside of the waistband
**finishing the tartan buckle straps, and sewing them on
**attaching the leather straps ( I opted for an inside strap on the left side, a la Matt Newsome, and went with two straps)
**pulling out some random leftover basting
**putting in a line of hidden stitching that fastens the inside of the reverse pleat to the outside layer of material
**Doing the sporran hangers
** re-pressing the pleats

OK, this is by NO means perfect. I see every flaw, you know. The only "glaring" one is that I made the waistband out of three strips of material, joining them, and I joined the one piece that functions as the waistband on the inner apron backwards, so the twill lines run the wrong way. However, that's nearly invisible under the over-apron, and I managed to match the stripes on that...waitsband/apron, just about perfectly. So I'm not gonna stress on it.

Yeah, the fringe is 1/8 of an inch off on the right hand edge of the over-apron. Not all my lines are perfectly straight in my tapered pleats, in fact, most of them aren't. But they're not HORRIBLE, I did a bleedin' lot of hand stitching to make this thing, and all things considered, I've made myself a pretty decent kilt. It's about 7 1/2 yards of heavy wool, and if I don't say so myself, I think it looks OK.

Pics to go up in a couple of minutes....

Total investment in time, spread out over many months... approximately 67 hours of work.

Naturally there's some twiddling to do, still...I have some thoughts about something I'd like to do to the liner and I really should move the buckles an inch so I can tighten 'er up a bit more, but I'm WEARING it, today, and YAAAAAAYYYYYYY!!!!!

[Colin]

Pictures, my man, pictures!

[Alan H]

Pictures, my man, pictures!

They're being e-mailed to me as we speak...LOL

[Alan H]

They're being e-mailed to me as we speak...LOL

Here's one....the others are over in the "Show us your Pics" forum..

[Alan H]

Just an update. With the help of me mate Casey from Clan MacNaughton, I have an identification of this tartan.

It's one of the variants on the Nicholson (MacNicol) Modern Red tartans. All-righty, then, a name, a name!

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb....ham/tartan.htm