those stupid 5 yard kilts and their shallow pleats: WRONG

[Alan H]

There's a perception that 5-yard kilts have shallower pleats than 8-9 yard kilts. Deeper pleats are always good, right?

Let's try again.

Piper George has a wonderful Ancient MacKay kilt with a ten inch sett. That's right, a ten inch sett. Since he's a piper and wanted the kilt pleated to stripe, and he wanted lots of pleats, he has over TEN YARDS of material in that kilt. why so much? ...The answer is because the sett is so freaking huge.

George is a stout lad, I'd guess that his hip measurement is about 50. If half of that is pleats, and half is aprons, that's 25 inches in pleats. There are 31 pleats in George's kilt, so each pleat reveal is 25 divided by 31 inches, or a little more than 3/4 of an inch of reveal per pleat.

Since the sett is so HUGE, wow, those pleats are really deep, almost 5 inches deep so that must be a really good kilt, right? I mean 'deep pleats" is synonymous with "good kilt" RIGHT, RIGHT? And it has over TEN YARDS of 16 ounce tartan in it, wow what a TANK! At $70 a yard, double width, this kilt has over $350 worth of cloth in it. SWEET! It cost a lot, too, so that also must mean that it's really GOOD, right?

I mean, assuming 1 yard of tartan for the under apron and kick pleat, and one yard for the over apron and first pleat (total of two yards) then how many yards of tartan are in all those pleats? 31 pleats X ten inches per pleat is 310 inches, or over eight and a half yards of tartan just in the pleats and ten and a half yards on the overall kilt.

Now, THAT is a kilt! Now that's a real He-Man kilt, right? RIGHT? It's SO much more totally fantastic and traditional and everything that some icky-stupid kilt with only 3 inch deep pleats! Right?

Answer: not necessarily.

Let's take Georges kilt, again. We'll make him a new one, eh? It'll be of the finest 20 ounce tartan, hand-woven by Mrs. Edith MacSchnozzle, who lives in a stone hut alongside the river Spey and has whisky for breakfast every morning of her 90-plus years AND is personally acquainted with the chieftan of the MacKay clan. The kilt is sewn up by Dame Barbara Twigglesbury, graduate of the MacSchnozzle school of kiltmaking, with 60 years of experience. Mrs. Twigglesury served a 30 year apprenticeship at Boyds of Edinburgh before they let her make her first kilt for actual retail sale.. It's lined with hand-woven silk and all the leather bits on the kilt are recovered from the wreckage of a 16th century galleon, stored in a nitrogen-filled warehouse in Bristol. All the metal parts are silver, the excess of what was used to cast the America cup trophy..

...........you get my drift? There's just one little difference between Georges first kilt and Georges second kilt. On the second kilt, the sett is 6 inches.

How much tartan is there, and how deep are the pleats on Georges second kilt?

Let's say he still has 31 pleats around that rumpus of his, so each pleat reveal is a little more than 3/4th of an inch. It's pleated to stripe, since he's a Piper. How much tartan in the pleats?

31 pleats X 6 inches per pleat = 186 inches, or 5.2 yards

Add in a yard for the over-apron and first pleat, add in another yard for the under-apron and kick pleat and you have a 7.2 yard kilt.

.........which of course is a total piece of garbage, that no self-respecting dapper gentleman would wear because

a. it doesn't have eight yards of material in it
b. the pleats aren't "deep enough"

So....says the spendthrift gentleman who has saved his pennies, nickels and silver dollars, as well as his Trust Fund payout. I will demand that my kiltmaker pleat to double-setts so that I shall have a truly fine kilt!

How much yardage, then, in our kilt with a six-inch sett, pleated to double-setts?

31 pleats X 12 inches per pleat = 372 inches or 10.33 yards.just in the pleats.

add in another yard for the over apron and first pleat, and the under-apron and kick pleat and you have a 12.3 yard kilt. Let's see, that means buying 6.3 yards of tartan, at $70 a yard, uh... $440 worth of tartan at $70 a yard, and we still have to pay for the labor to sew the thing up. It will cost a MINT in materials and weigh Lord knows how much to wear.

Question: What factors influence pleat depth, sett size and yardage of the kilt?

Let's work it out.

[Bugbear]

Pleat reveal.

And I kind of like the wide pleat reveal on some of the canvas man-skirts, but don't tell anyone...

[Alan H]

Three things interact to determine pleat depth.

1. the size of the person you're fitting

2. the sett size

3. the amount of cloth.

for example...I made a PV kilt, a five-yarder for The Black Knight on this board. He's a skinny teenager with a waist of 30 and a hip measurement of 34. I used cloth with a 5 inch sett.

Half of his hip measurement is 17, which is what I need to cover in pleats. I know that pleats smaller than about 3/4 of an inch start looking too busy, though you could go down to 5/8th if you really wanted to, so I went with 3/4 of an inch. That gave me 22-23 pleats, which was a LOT of narrow pleats down his backside. The pleat depth was 2.125 inches.

How much, tartan went into this kilt?

22 pleats X 5 inches per sett = 110 inches or almost exactly 3 yards.

One yard for over-apron, one yard for under apron , plus the three for the pleats, and the Black Knight gets a very traditional-looking kilt with 3/4 inch pleats and pleats that are as deep as single-sett pleating will allow with FIVE yards....not eight or ten, but FIVE yards of tartan, and in reality, in fact I used more like four-and-a-half because I didn't need full yards for the over and under-aprons...

What if we'd used the same amount of tartan to cover MY backside? I have a 49 inch butt, so divide that in half. Call it 25 inches.

I need to use 3 yards of tartan to cover that space, since that's how much I used on the Black Knights kilt. I'm pleating to stripe, so 1 sett = 1 pleat, I get 22 pleats, too. HOWEVER, my 22 pleats have to cover 25 inches of rumpus rather than his 17 inches, so MY pleat reveals are roughly 1 1/8th inch, and my pleats are 1.9 inches deep.

In other words, the 5 yards of tartan with a 5-inch sett looks very narrow-pleat traditional on The Black Knight, but looks more "wide-pleat, casual" on me. So, back to the question about which has the biggest influence...sett size, yardage or the size of the guy?

Hard to say, exactly, eh?

Smaller guys need less tartan....bigger guys need more tartan, or bigger pleat reveals or more cloth.

Smaller setts use up less material per pleat, so you use up less fabric in the pleats. Bigger setts eat up material in those pleats.

Smaller setts result in shallower pleats unless you pleat to double -setts and then you double the amount of cloth you have to buy, as well as doubling the cost of the kilts materials..

REALLY shallow pleats, like an inch or so, really do look different from deep pleats. Once pleats get to be significantly over 2 inches deep, though, until you start sticking your hand or a ruler in there, I personally don't see much difference. Two-and-a-half inches... five inches pleat depth? Big whoop, IMHO.

Sett size, amount of tartan, the size of the man all interact in ways which are not hard to figure out, but which make generalizations like:

"five yard kilts have shallow pleats"..WILDLY inaccurate. It's my humble opinion, on this board where we try to disseminate information to folks who are learning about kilts, that we not dispense too many chunks of inaccurate information.

I'm a week or two away from finishing a kilt in Gray Stewart. It's pleated to sett, and the size of the sett worked out just wonderfully with about a 7/8th inch pleat reveal. The kilt will have 29 pleats. It's gonna look spanking great, I can tell already. It's made out of wool, with a 4.5 inch sett (which is about the smallest sett I would ever use in a mans kilt, lots of Fraser and Kirkbrights stuff has setts about this size) , and it's a 6 yard kilt, I'm a rather large fellow, and it will look totally traditional.

Be careful with those generalizations, eh?.

[Rex_Tremende]

Let's take Georges kilt, again. We'll make him a new one, eh? It'll be of the finest 20 ounce tartan, hand-woven by Mrs. Edith MacSchnozzle, ...

OMG! You know Edith?

...who lives in a stone hut alongside the river Spey and has whisky for breakfast every morning of her 90-plus years AND is personally acquainted with the chieftan of the MacKay clan. The kilt is sewn up by Dame Barbara Twigglesbury, graduate of the MacSchnozzle school of kiltmaking, with 60 years of experience. Mrs. Twigglesury served a 30 year apprenticeship at Boyds of Edinburgh before they let her make her first kilt for actual retail sale.. It's lined with hand-woven silk and all the leather bits on the kilt are recovered from the wreckage of a 16th century galleon, stored in a nitrogen-filled warehouse in Bristol. All the metal parts are silver, the excess of what was used to cast the America cup trophy..

We're not really buying a kilt, you see. It's a lifestyle.






Not unlike Starbucks.






The competition isn't other kilts, but other places we could spend our money, like Maybachs and Candy Spelling's cottage. So, I'm not sure what the debate is here.

Regards,
Rex.

[pdcorlis]

...We're not really buying a kilt, you see. It's a lifestyle...

A lifestyle? A lifestyle? You mean I have a lifestyle? And all this time I thought I was buying clothes...

[beerbecue]

Not unlike Starbucks.

Then you can count me out.

[Colonel MacNeal]

I can't imagine wearing 8 yards of heavy wool here in Texas. But it might work in Fargo, North Decoder. Let climate be the guide to your yardage.

[Tattoo Bradley]

I can't imagine wearing 8 yards of heavy wool here in Texas. But it might work in Fargo, North Decoder. Let climate be the guide to your yardage.

I wear 8 yards of wool here in New Mexico, in high summer, with nay a problem. I've also worn that same kilt in Houston in summer, no hotter than anything else. You sweat in anything down there.

But, I personally prefer the traditional 4 yard box pleated kilt as made by Matt Newsome and Barb Tewksbury. Although not necessarily due to climate or the like. I've actually not found much difference in either in different climates. Your mileage may very.

[george7]

Now I must brew a pot of coffee.

[Kilt_Noob]

damn people, my head hurt after reading all that...and I'm stll lost...what is the question? And what is the point?
All I know is:
1. I got the best guy in the area to build me a tank
2. It weighs a ton
3. I wanted the pleats to strip
4. I spend over $500 for it
5. I think it can stop up to a 5.56 round directly and possibly 7.62 indirectly