Making a 4-yard, Box Pleat in the California Tartan:an ongoing thread

[Tartan Hiker]

Okay, did I miss these pictures?

http://www.xmarksthescot.com/forum/s...ad.php?t=24519

[thomsec]

Wow, I am in awe. Amazing job, and only 13 hours!
Charlie

[Panache]

Here's a picture of the pleats of the finished kilt.



Alan did a great job on this. It is a really handsome kilt.

Cheers

[JimB]

The kilt looks great!
Good job Alan!

That boot looks a little ominous though!

[Alan H]

The only digital camera I have is in my cellphone, and I have yet to figure out how to upload those pictures. I got a digital camera from KCW in trade for his X-Kilt, but I managed to wreck it on the backpacking trip I took this past summer....Ergo, no in-progress pictures.

Anyway, stitching the box pleats from the INSIDE. Let's start from the beginning.

1. Figure out your box pleat width. This is simple geometry if you want to center one single article of the sett in the same place in the pleats. It is scads harder to describe in words than it is to see in practice.

So do this exercise... get a piece of paper, like binder paper. Using colored pens and a ruler, make a few accurate, repeating box patterns...something like a SUPER-simple tartan on the paper. For example, make red squares and blue squares, that symmetrically overlap one another.. Now fold up the paper in big box pleats so that the red stripe is in the center of the revealed parts of the pleats. What you will discover is that you can make really small pleats and line up the red stripes so that every repeat of the red stripe is shown, or you can make larger pleats so that every other red stripe is on the revealed part of a pleat. It's likely that the "every other repetition" is what you want. Use a ruler to measure your pleat reveals and compare that to the size of the boxes you draw. The geometric relationship will be immediately apparent.

Step 2: when your tartan arrives, repeat the above step but with the fabric, itself. Decide which tartan element you will center, and how wide your pleats will be. Just like knife pleating, the appearrance of the back of the kilt will vary depending on what tartan element you decide to center on the pleat reveals. Figure out how many pleats you will have that will get you close to your butt/hip-measurement splits. THIS IS DIFFERENT FROM WORKING WITH KNIFE PLEATS because instead of having many small pleats, you have only a few wide ones. So get as close as you can to your butt/hip splits and then figure out how big your over-apron will have to be to make up the difference.

Step 3: Personally, I cut out my fabric, pinned it all and test-pleated it because I didn't know where the "join" was going to be. Turns out that if I'd started sewing right away I'd have either wound up with the "join" smack-dab in the middle of my center box pleat, or I'd have wasted an entire sett trying to bury it. Well, I didn't have enough fabric to waste a whole sett, so I went back and re-pinned (I made the deep pleat smaller) and I basically "moved a setts-worth of fabric into the pleats". By doing that I could just cut out about 1/3 of a sett and put the join right where one of the inner folds of the box pleats was going to be anyway....voila!

Moral: on your first one, pin and test pleat FIRST, before sewing. Test pleat your tapers in, as well. They will be BIG tapers, because you will have 6-7-8 pleats in which to pull up 3-4-5 inches, instead of 25-30 pleats.

Step four: Baste your pleats. Lord, this is going to be hard to describe, but it was easy to visualize when I had fabric in My hands. What I did was use contrasting thread and very small stitches close to the edges and baste the edges of the tapered pleats together. Smoosh the box pleat flat on the table and center the tartan element you want in the middle of the INSIDE of the pleat. Get it all centered and lovely. I used about 16 basting stitches over 8 inches of tartan. DO NOT SEW THE PLEATS TO THE UNDERLYING FABRIC...just baste the pleat edges to one another and take care to line up the tartan elements.

Now, take the kilt, which is lying outside-up on the table, and turn it over. The box pleat is smooshed flat on the table, right? I want you to turn that box pleat on it's side, 90 degrees, and re-smoosh it flat, but oriented 90 degrees from how it was origianlly smooshed. Look for those basting stitches. They should line up , pretty closely, from fell to waistline. OK, now put your kilt on your sewing machine and run a line of stitching in a thread that matches the tartan color, from fell to waistline right next to those bits of the basting stitches that you can see. If you want to stitch that line by hand, go right ahead. It will be invisible, though, so machine-stitching will be fine.

Double the stitching at the bottom of the fell for 4-5-6 stitches, for strength.

Now take the kilt off of the machine, and lay it on the table again, right side-up. Rip out the basting stitches and admire your perfectly tapered box pleat.

*************************************

Does that help?

BTW, your last box pleat is going to butt up next to the reverse pleat, right? This is 'way over on the right side of the kilt. Well the reverse pleats on most kilts are pretty deep, and I would recommend making the last half of your last box pleat quite deep, to complelent the reverse pleat. This may mean that you have to center a different tartan element in the underneath-center of the reverse pleat, than you did in the insides of your box pleats. For example in my California tartan kilt I have the gold stripes in the middle of my box pleats, but because I made the last fold of the last box pleat extra-deep, I have th elight blue line centered in the middle of the reverse pleat.

I COULD have centered another gold stripe under there, but then the reverse pleat and the last half of the last box pleat would have been HUGE and I coudn't handle using up that much fabric.

...........and if that next-to-last paragraph doesn't make you scratch your head, I don't know what will!

[Tartan Hiker]

Actually, Alan, that description is perfect. I was pretty sure that I understood from your original post, and now I'm sure of it.

Thanks for all the other tips, too. No doubt that will save lots of time.

Now the jonesing for my fabric!

Thanks again!