waistband tartan for a very tall man's kilt

[Dalmore]

A quick question, related but unrelated...
...if you don't mind my asking, how tall is this person? I am, what I consider to be tall (6 foot 3 inches) and a 24" length works fine for me (kilt to the top of the knee).

I guess this means I'm not so tall after all.

[Barb T]

A quick question, related but unrelated...
...if you don't mind my asking, how tall is this person? I am, what I consider to be tall (6 foot 3 inches) and a 24" length works fine for me (kilt to the top of the knee).

I guess this means I'm not so tall after all.

It's always hard to generalize, because different people have different waist-hip distances even if they are the same height overall. I've made kilts for some tall people, but the only person who was tall enough for the waist band issue to raise its head was about 6'4" tall. He was a bit high waisted, which accentuated the length, and I think his kilt overall was 26 1/2", including the 2" rise. I had single width fabric that was about 27 1/2" wide, which didn't leave me enough for a top band. If I had had double width fabric, I would have been all set.

Having said all this, it's a very rare person who really needs a kilt this long. Lots of people measure themselves inaccurately and initially send me lengths that are an inch or even several inches too long. When I chip away at it, and I get them to measure properly, most guys come in at 20-23" plus a 2" rise. And this includes the tall ones. Paradoxically, women typically have longer kilt lengths for a given height than men do.

[bonnie heather]

This kilt was for a man 6' 6" who needed a 27" long kilt (that includes a 2" rise).
Today I was finishing up a 24 1/2" kilt for a man who is 6' tall. The tartan was double width and there was a 6" wide strip left for the waistband. No problem. But..... the tartan pattern in that strip (the other scraps,too) didn't work for the 3rd buckle tab (the lower one). What to do? What to do? I ended up piecing together 2 pieces so the tartan would match and the piecing would be hidden behind.
This causes me to wonder....
Do kiltmakers save all the tartan scraps from all the kilts they make?
If so, do kiltmakers help eachother out by sharing tartan scraps for such cases when we need just that little bit more of tartan and don't quite have enough? Or for when we're doing an alteration or a repair on an older kilt and need just a wee bit for a patch or to make a top band a few inches longer? What do other kiltmakers do?

[Barb T]

Most people use what's left over from cutting out the pleats to make the buckle tabs. This will work if you've pleated the kilt to the sett. It _won't_ work if you've pleated to the stripe, because you have to match the stripe in the buckle tab but what you've cut out doesn't contain the stripe (in most cases, anyway).

Did you try the pleat cut-outs?

Also, depending on how the pleats lay out, I sometimes have a strip that I cut off at the join or at the underapron edge that is a full tartan repeat or close enough to use for buckle tabs.

If I've pleated to the stripe, and I don't have anything left to match the stripe, I match the buckle tab horizontally, and I don't worry about matching the vertical stripe. It looks fine.

And, I used to save all my scraps, but now I pretty much ship them off to the customer with the kilt. I found that they were just accumulating on my shelf and I wasn't using them for anything. I save a few scraps to add to my swatch collection, but that's it.

Also - when I put the top band on, I fold in a tail that's 5-6" long and tack it to the inside of the kilt. It never shows, but, if the kilt needed alteration, there's some matching top band attached right to the kilt.

And what with dye lots, thread weights, multiple mills, etc., the chances of me having a scrap of a particular tartan that would match something that someone else made awhile ago is slim, I think.