Basting pleats for pressing

**Hendry** · 25th February 08, 05:05 PM

Thanks Barb, I could have used that last week, thankfully made it through unscathed

**turpin** · 25th February 08, 09:34 PM

I bookmarked this one before it finished loading, even though I do have "The Book".

The nice thing is it's easy to baste a straight line by following the tartan (states Turpin, Master of the Obvious).

**andyfg** · 26th February 08, 06:09 AM

Thanks Barb. Always helpful.

**Barb T** · 26th February 08, 06:10 AM

Originally Posted by Rex_Tremende

Barb -

In the third figure, I think I count five layers of fabric formed by the folds where the longitudinal stitches are depicted. The basting stitch only goes through the top four layers and skips the bottom?

Also, if we take the time to baste the kilt, can it also be dry cleaned in this state if we are afraid of the bathtub method?

Thanks,
Rex.

Wally has it right. You see 5 layers in the drawing, but, when you're actually doing the basting, you've only stitched through 4 layers (2 pleats). That fifth layer was out of the way when you stitched the previous four layers.

I've thought often of your suggestion of having a kilt dry cleaned as basted. In principle, it would work. I think I'd take a basted kilt to the cleaner and ask how much stress would be placed on the basting stitches during the dry cleaning process, and they could tell you whether you'd wind up with a lot of little stretched holes in your kilt.

**Abax** · 29th February 08, 09:13 PM

This would be a good one for the Tutorials forum.

Abax

**Splash_4** · 10th July 08, 10:01 AM

Sorry to dredge up an old thread, but I was just getting ready to post a question on how to baste a kilt so that it can be repressed. Most of my kilts are getting to the stage that the knife edges are getting soft. As I want to clean the kilts and then repress the pleats I needed to learn how to baste them

Thanks again for a great tutorial Barb!

(p.s. The search function is your friend!)