Cautionary tale about hemming a dress tartan

[Barb T]

Grrr snarl. I'll tell you my tale of frustration from today in the hopes that it saves someone else the lost hours that I just spent.

I'm making a kilt from a fairly light weight dress tartan that doesn't have a kilting selvedge. I got all the pleats done, did the back join, turned up the hem, stitched the hem, and started to press the crease at the bottom of the kilt. That's when I noticed that the dark stripe that I had turned up in the hem ghosted through the white block in the front. You can see it easily in the scan below - at the top, it looks like there's a dirty gray stripe - that's the ghost of the black/purple/orange stripe showing through.



I'm used to working with Dalgliesh dress tartans, which are heavy enough that the white is opaque and you don't have to worry about where you turn the hem up. This stuff is lighter, and the white is a bit translucent. Grr snarl.

Anyway, the only solution to this particular problem was to take the entire kilt apart - yes, all the pleats, everything, cut about an inch off the tartan, and lay the kilt out again with the hem fold in the middle of the dark stripe. The kilt won't have quite as deep a hem, but it's still plenty deep enough. So much for everything that I did yesterday....

So, moral of this story is to check what the hem edge will look like _before_ you lay out the kilt. But, this is a good illustration that you can, in fact, undo everything up until you cut out the pleats.

Grr snarl....