Obnoxiously long ramble; past, present and future of kilt-wearing for yours truly

[Alan H]

Don't mind me, I'm just in the middle of a hard time in life that's been going on too long, and I'm a little bit tired of what feels to me like non-stop wrangling on this board. So I'm just going to write for a bit.

I got started thinking I could wear a kilt when I started going to Celtic music festivals. I actually went and saw Riverdance...I'm almost embarrassed to say that! Anyway, I LOVED it, fell in love with the low whistle and bought one, and started going to Celtic music festivals. Now, the majority of these things in the SF Bay Area focus on Irish music, though the Sebastopol Festival featured the Tannahill Weavers, back in 2005. However, none of the weavers wear a kilt. Anyway, I saw the Celtic Rock band, "Tempest" several times and the fiddle player wears a black Utilikilt. I thought "I could wear that", and went to the vendors booths, looking. After fainting at the price, and seeing that traditional Scottish kilts were even more expensive, I set out online to find a source of kilts that I could actually buy and not break out in a cold sweat over the expense.

From that search I found X Marks the Scot, and Stillwater kilts. I remember wearing my first Stillwater Standard Black Watch (they didn't have sewn-down fell in those days) to my sailing society meeting with the basting stitches still in! I bought my first sporran off of ebay for about $35. Turns out it was a semi-formal job, not a daywear sporran, but what the heck. I still wear it! Anyway, it went from there. I wore a kilt to work at Stanford a couple of times, and when it became clear that my job was going down the drain and there was nothing I could do to stop it, I started wearing the kilt almost every day. I bought a USA Kilts Casual model, and wore that too. I made my first canvas kilt....made it too small, BTW, and basically made a canvas copy of Rocky's design.

Somewhere in there, Matt Newsome designed the X Marks tartan and I got involved in finding a weaver to make the stuff. While Steve Ashton was the catalyst to make that actually happen, I think I can claim to be the guy who said "yes we can" to the idea of producing our own tartan, and kick-started the project that Steve actually carried out. I ordered three yards of the first run, bought Barbs book, and told Steve "I can't wait to make my first tartan kilt".

The Curmudgeon replied "oh, no you don't. You go get some cheap stuff and practice, first". So it was that I ordered some large red tartan...I had no idea what clan or even if it was a clan tartan at all, off of ebay. I sat myself down with Barbs book, and 47 hours of mostly hand-sewing later, I had a more-or-less traditional kilt. I still wear it, though it's a bit small these days. I really need to re-do the stabilizer, as I didn't do it anywhere near right, but that's OK. The kilt isn't even worsted wool, it's saxony, but for all that, it looks pretty good, especially for a first go.

My job went south, and I started nine months of unemployment, in which I spent about three months substitute teaching. While I looked for work pretty hard, I also saw what seemed to be a need on this board for a simple "idiots guide to a really simple kilt" for all the guys who kept saying they wanted to make a kilt, but it was too hard. I knew that making a traditional kilt was hard, but that machine-sewing up a simple pleated wraparound contemporary kilt could be pretty simple. So I asked a couple of guys at our Nor Cal beer and kilts night what they wanted, and the first two X-kilts got made. I then made two more, and wrote up the manual as it stands right now.

Over the next year I assembled assorted kilted kit: The Eton jacket off of Ebay, Miz Strings outrageous kilt hose (hand-knitted), some nice belts, kilt pins and so-on. The Nor Cal Rabble had its first Burns Night, which was a smashing success, and a year later we had another one. I made kilt after kilt, averaging about one every three to four weeks for almost two years. Panache has one of my kilts, so does TimC. Piper George had two of them before the fire took them. I practiced on two different kilts, pleating to sett preparing to make my X Marks tartan kilt, and it paid off in a very nice semi-tank, which I like a lot. The Curmudgeon was right.

I tried making an X-Skirt manual to match the X-Kilt manual, but it sort of never took off. Ce la vie!

And so, now four years and a couple of months later, here I am. This is the here and now.

I wear a kilt to work about 2-3 times a week and think nothing of it. My coworkers think nothing of it. My in-laws think nothing of it. The Hispanic guys at the cafeteria think nothing of it. I throw large, heavy objects at Highland Games. I sometimes wrangle with friends over kilt-wearing topics on X Marks. My outlook is pretty free-wheeling, I suppose it's rather liberal though I think I go to some pains to wear my kilts...from tartan tanks to my camouflage X-Kilt, reasonably well. I think I know when to get "dressed up" in a tie and jacket, and when to wear a black t-shirt, a camouflage kilt, and a pair of combat boots. All in all, I remain pretty convinced that when it comes right down to it, "the kilt" is an article of clothing, and not religion.

Here, look at it this way. My mother in law is dying. My wife is a wreck, my brother in law is a wreck. Dad's Parkinsons disease is getting worse and worse. I come here to X Marks and I see guys getting really riled up over white socks, either pro or con, and I have to just kind of disengage. They're socks, you know? I'm supposed to get all *whatever* about socks when a woman that I care for very deeply is twenty feet away from me, in the bedroom down the hall, going through the process of dying? I can't do it.

You know, sometimes I write some pretty heated stuff on the board. I bet y'all think that I'm sitting behind the keyboard with steam coming out of my ears. Well...uh. I'm not. Never have.

Anyway...back to kilts. So what does the future hold?

Well, I think it holds three more tartan kilts that I will make, though the truth is that right now I'm mighty low on motivation to finish them. I might wind up sending my MacNaughton, Ancient to Barb, which would be kind of funny, since in a way all my kiltmaking has been to lead up to that final, ultimate project. I'll probably knock out another contemporary, and call it good.

Will I still be wearing kilts, say ten years from now? Probably, though I can't predict how often. I'm long, long over being militant about it. There are pants in my closet, still, I just don't wear the "dressy" ones very much. I don't see wearing a kilt as a sign of virtue, or personal strength, and I can't see that changing. I well know that it takes a certain "something" to strap the thing on and walk outside the first time...heck, the first twenty times, but there comes a point where it's just another thing to wear. I certainly wear my MacNaughton and Hall (when it's done) kilts as a little link to my very, very thinned-out Scottish blood, but they're not some all encompassing, life-defining piece of precious heritage to me. They're cool clothes. I think they will stay that way.

I can't see myself ever spending thousands of dollars on kilt wear. I can't ever see myself being overly concerned with being "proper" or "correct" though I have no wish to be offensive. I CAN see myself spending some amount of time trying to look presentable, I just can't ever see obsessing about it. I can't ever see "kilts" as really defining who I am. The things that I do....my achievements and how I treat other people define who I am. I am more likely to describe myself as "kilt maker" rather than "kilt wearer" and that trait of mine will not change.

At a fundamental level, I can never conceive of myself where "The clothes make the man" is my watchword. Rather, it's what I do and the words that I say and how I treat others that define who I am. In the end, clothes are just clothes no matter how tradition-laden (or not) they are, and that attitude I can not ever see changing, for me.

When I die, will I be buried or cremated in a kilt? I doubt it. Will I wear a kilt to My 50th wedding anniversary with Joan? I have no idea, ask me in twenty years.

I just ran out of steam to write more. Thanks for reading.