Yes, I could box-pleat this, which is a thought. It'd have more box-pleats than one of Matt's kilts, more like about 12-14 pleats, but yeah, that would work just fine. Hmmm. I might have enough left over for a vest, too.....like I've got time to make a tartan vest?

Cavscout, actually to get deeper pleats and only pleat one sett, I'd have to make a smaller reveal. I could do that, but I'm thinking that I'd need more material because the number of pleats would go up. Also, I don't know that I want to hand-sew 35+ pleats into a kilt that I'm not "involved with" you know? If this were the X Marks tartan or the California tartan or MacNaughton, I'd do it....but it's not..

Just a note on sett size and pleat depth for anybody who's reading..... If you think about it, you can't just "make deeper pleats" when you're pleating a kilt to a pattern (the sett). The pattern, combined with the amount of "reveal" you want defines the depth of the pleat. Since the revealed part of the pleat is usually between 3/4 and 1.5 inches, making a 1/4 inch change in "reveal" won't significantly affect the depth of the pleats. It will, however, significantly change the number of pleats you have to sew! You can pleat double setts, which works fine, but that does go through tartan rather quickly. If you take a 4.5 inch sett and fold it in half, (which is analogous to having NO revealed part of the pleat at all) you'd only have pleats that are 2.25 inches deep. That's just barely acceptable, in my mind, and obviously you can't have NO revealed section of the pleat, right?

Barb says in her book that pleats less than 1/2 inch don't look good, and I'd agree with that. OK, so If I use a 1/2 inch reveal, then that means my pleat depth will be half of what's left of the sett.

4.5 inches minus 0.5 inch = 4 inches.

Divide that 4 inches in half and you get two-inch deep pleats. That's OK for a tartan skirt, but it kind of doesn't cut it, in my mind, for a kilt. Now, this is just "ME", you know? My 5-yard Holyrood has pleats which are 2.25 inches deep. That looks fine to me, but I don't think that 2 inch deep pleats is gonna work very well.

There's something else to think on, and that's the amount of work I want to go through. My hip (read: butt) measurement is 48 inches. OK divide that in half, because of course half of the kilt is in the aprons and half is in pleats, right? OK, so that's 24. If I'm going to cover that 24 inches 'round me rump with half-inch wide pleats, that means I'm hand-sewing FORTY EIGHT PLEATS!!!!!!!!!

Forget it!! No way am I hand-sewing 48 pleats. If I use one-inch wide reveals, then that 24 inches is covered by 24 pleats, which is just dandy. If I cover that 24 inches with 3/4 inch wide pleats, then I'd have 32 pleats, which his the very upper end of what I'd ever consider hand-sewing. But the one-inch reveals give me a pleat depth like this...

4.5 inches (sett size) - 1 inch (the reveal) = 3.5 inches
Divide that 3.5 inches in half to get pleat depth and you get 1.75 inches. YUCK. That's nowhere near deep enough to make a decent-looking kilt.

Note that a tartan with a 6-inch sett (the X Marks tartan is about 6 inches, a bit more) If you use a one-inch reveal, will have 2.5 inch deep pleats, which looks good.. If you use a 3/4 inch reveal it will have 2.64 inch ( or 2 and 5/8ths inches) deep reveal, which is starting to look pretty nice, to my eye.