OK, next up on the table is a box pleat kilt made out of the X-marks tartan.

I've been looking at pictures of Matts box pleats and thinking.."How does he get so many pleats?" My box pleat California Tartan just has six pleats. Anyway, I figured out a way to make more, narrower box pleats, but then the overlap of material gets to be extreme at the waistband and I'm not sure how to get around that without cutting out material. So this afternoon I did a very odd thing.

I test-pleated the tartan into 4 sets of pleats that were as narrow as possible without overlapping any of the folds from one pleat onto another pleat. I know that I need to cover Y (half of the waist measurement) with pleats. OK, so how many of these "as small as possible" box pleats can I put into "y" ...in other words, how many pleats will this thing have?

Answer: six. The "smallest possible box pleat without overlapping another pleat and/or cutting out material" is just about 2.5 inches on the X-Marks tartan

From there I worked up how much to flare them out to, at the bottom of the fell to achieve the proper taper.

Nothing like working totally backwards!