Sett Size

[fluter]

As the reveal of the pleat is necessarily 1/3 the sett, ...

Jack, I don't follow that. I believe that it's true for a box-pleat, or a box pleat of the "standard" regular sort; but the knife pleat is much more flexible.

Normally, it would work out

depth = 1/2 (sett - reveal)

where depth and reveal are not necessarily equal. In practice, a little length goes into the folds, I think --- I am not an expert, nor do I play one on the 'net. I just like algebra.

I'm looking at a practice kilt with sett 5 inches plus, depth 4-1/2", reveal just short of 1 inch. (double sett per pleat)

[Barb T]

I'm concerned that you're taking a tartan whose sett is 14+" and shrinking it down. The reason that the original sett was so huge is that it is an ABAC tartan. If it were ABAB, the sett would be more "normal" (7" or so). The main elements in a tartan look "kilt-like" when they are are a few inches across. I'm concerned that taking an ABAC tartan with a 14" sett and shrinking the whole sett to 7" is going to make the four elements (A, B, and C) less than 2" across instead of nearly 4" across. I'd be worried that the tartan would have a really teeny look to it (more like it was made for a tartan shirt).

Below, you'll see an example of an ABAC tartan with a sett of 15". If the sett were shrunk to 7.5", each element would be only half the size that it is. So, anyway, the reason that this tartan "works" as a kilting tartan is because it's the right "scale". I think it would look odd and not very "kilt-like" if all the elements were shrunk in half.

And, in fact, you _can't_ make the sett on this particular tartan any smaller, because the smallest element, the red stripe, is 2 threads wide at a sett size of 14". As someone mentioned above, you can't have an element smaller than 2 threads, so you couldn't actually shrink this tartan in half.

BTW - the tartan is Weathered Stewart Old Sett. And, in order to actually make a kilt from this, I pleated it to the red stripe, which lies in the "A" block and is repeated twice every sett (i.e., every 7.5")




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