material for a first homemade kilt

[MacKenzie]

Oh - and my Mom always made a distinction between "homemade", which sounds a bit pejorative, and handmade. You will be making a _handmade_ kilt!

When someone would call the tools and implements wrought from my grandfathers forge and welder 'homemade' he would say, "Cookies are homemade. These are handmade."

And, to be sure, he wasn't belittling Grandma's cookies.

[knotty]

Very well said Steve.

Its interesting that I was thinking along those lines when I made mine

This quote hangs in my shop

"To some people 'handmade' means that at some time during it's manufacture, someone's hand touched it. To me 'handmade' means that before my hand touched it, it did not exist." anon

That is pretty powerful when you think about it.

Now, think about what your goal is in making your first kilt. Do you want to learn how to make more kilts? Or do you just want to make one to sort of try it all out and see if you like it?

If your goal is to make more than one kilt then adopt the concept that guides most craftsmen. You will never achieve perfection. It is handmade by a human being. There will always be something you can look at and say "I could have done that better".

A true craftsman is always practicing, always perfecting their craft.

If you want to be a professional Kiltmaker you will practice a lot. 50, 100, 1000 kilts and you are still practicing, still striving for that impossible perfection.

But not everyone is capable of doing everything well. I can't dance well, I can't play a musical instrument well. But I can make kilts well. And one day, maybe one day, I will make the perfect kilt. Probably about 10 min. before I die.

[chasem]

Check out this website for the discount wool tartan, double wide, 12oz.

http://wooltartan.com/discount-tartans/

A word of caution: I've ordered from this link twice. The first time the wool was okay - not great.

The second time it was unusable for a kilt. There were only 4 yards left of what I ordered, so I got it all. I measured, cut, and ripped the first side, then checked it against the other side only to find that the two sides would not match up. The part of the tartan that was repeated in the 26.5" I had already ripped took nearly 28" to repeat on the other side... which meant there was no way to piece these two pieces together to form a kilt-length of any sort, as the material is too light to be suitable as a 4-yard kilt.

I've since found another use for the two 4-yard pieces (as part of a tartan quilt which I'll post about here eventually...) but I was certainly not happy about the wool either time, particularly that second order.