My annual lectures: pleats and yardage, take three

[Alan H]

I have two annual lectures. A. is "why kilts cost as much as they do", and B. is "how much material goes into my kilt?"

It's time for B. again.

Lots of people say that the less yardage there is in a kilt, the shallower the pleats will be. There’s a female kiltmaker and costumer who hangs out at most of the Games we go to here in Nor Cal who will gladly sniff at your kilt and tell you what a piece of junk it is because the pleats aren’t deep enough, thereby showing her ….not ignorance, because she knows better….well, we’ll just leave it there.

Now, most of the time, it is true statement to say that the less material results in a kilt with shallower pleats, but it is such a general statement to cover such a wide variety of situations, that it borders on “untruth” to me. Thus, this lecture.

Three things interact to define how deep a kilts pleats will be.

1. how deep the kiltmaker decides they will be…and don’t discount this, it’s important
2. the sett size
3. the amount of material the kiltmaker has to work with

A kiltmaker COULD make an eight yard kilt by folding over 4 yards of tartan in a series of massive under-apron pleats piled on top of each other, and then use the rest to make a kilt with just a few really wide pleats, couldn’t they? I mean it would have the Mystical, All-Holy eight yards of material in it, right? But that’s stupid. A sensible kiltmaker will make a kilt where the tartan is distributed sensibly between the aprons and pleats, keeping in mind the amount of material they have to work with and the customers budget.

As a very general rule, and of course there is a LOT of variation in this depending on the size of the person, it takes roughly a yard of tartan to make the over-apron and the underlying pleat, and the fringe on the right-hand edge for an average-sized man. Ditto for the reverse pleat and under-apron, though it usually take me a bit less than a yard for the under-apron. Remember, there’s a lot of variation here, depending on the size of the man. I’ll say this again THERE A LOT OF VARIATION depending on the size of the man.

But, moving on, if we have five yards of material to work with, then two yards of that cloth is devoted to the under-apron and over apron, leaving THREE YARDS for pleats. If we have eight yards of material, then we have SIX YARDS left. Remember those numbers.

About pleat width….. most good-looking traditional “eight yard” kilts have pleat reveals that are around ¾ of an inch wide. This number is not cast in stone. 5/8ths is fine, too, though to my eye ½ an inch is starting to get awfully narrow. I wouldn t make a kilt with a ½ inch pleats reveal unless I had to. 3/8th of an inch is pointless, looks bad and all you do is waste money on kiltmaker labour and cloth. The kilt I’m currently making has 7/8 inch pleats and it looks good but they’re a bit wide for a “traditional” kilt. Suffice it to say that the optimal range is probably from 5/8 of an inch to ¾ of an inch.

Think about how a kilt is made… Basically, your front half is covered by the over and under aprons, and your back half is covered in pleats. Let’s take a hypothetical “average sized guy” with a hip measurement of 44. Now, I’m going to simplify things a bit from Barbs guidelines, but MORE OR LESS, this means thatt 22 inches of this guys rumpus is going to be covered in pleats, right? 22 inches. Remember that number.

Go back up a couple of paragraphs. Remember that the “five yard kilt”, after subtracting the amount of cloth needed for the aprons, will have three yards of material left for pleats, and the eight yard kilt will have six yards. Those 3/6 yards are going to cover 22 inches, folded up into pleats.

Now we get into sett size. The X-Marks tartan is a good tartan and most of us are familiar wit it. The sett on the X-Marks tartan is 6 1/8 inches. Let’s simpliy matters and say that it’s six inches, just for the sake of discussion. OK, if it’s six inches, then how many setts of X-Marks tartan will fix into 3 yards of cloth?.......How many will fit into 6yards of cloth?

Easy… there will be 18 setts in the 3 yards of cloth, and there will be 36 setts in the 6 yards of cloth.

OK, again siimplifying things just a little bit, GENERALLY you get one pleat per sett, when you fold the cloth up to make a kilt. You get exactly one pleat per sett if you pleat to stripe, you might get a bit differently from that if you pleat to sett, but it’s going to be close. We’ll use one pleat-one sett as our general rule.

This will mean that in the five yard kilt, we’d have 18 pleats to cover the 22 inches of our hypothetical fellows rumpus. The eight yard kilt would have 36 pleats.

How big will those 18 pleats be? Well, take 22 and divide it by 18 on your calculator, and you get 1.222, or close enough to 1 ¼ inch. So the pleats on the five yard kilt in the X Marks tartan, that go ‘round our hypothetical man will be 1 ¼ inch wide. That’s fine for a more casual kilt, but there’s folks who will look at that askance, saying “that’s not traditional”. BTW, this is about how many pleats my USA Kilts Casual model has.

OK, our eight yard kilt had 36 pleats to cover those 22 inches, remember? That would make for a pleat reveal of .6111 inches, or allll-most 5/8 of an inch. PERFECT! We can use up all eight yards of this tartan and have fantastic-looking 5/8ths inch pleats going ‘round our hypothetical man’s rumpus. Fantastic!

But not all tartan setts are 6 inches wide, and not all men have 44 inch hip measurements.

What if our hypothetical man was quite slender, and had 36 inch hips? Then the 5 yards kilts 18 pleats would be divided over 18 inches, and those pleats would be 1 inch wide, which IMHO is a nice pleat width, though a bit wide-ish.

But the “eight yard kilts” six-yards-for-pleats….36 pleats would be crammed into those 18 inches, resulting in really narrow pleat reveals of ½ an inch. In fact, it would probably be worse than that, because the aprons wouldn’t take a full yard, and so it would likely be 38 pleats crammed into 18 inches, with pleat reveals LESS than ½ an inch.

And that’s a waste. If this fellow had a SEVEN yard kilt, he’d have five yards left for pleats (2 yards goes into the aprons), which would render 30 pleats at .7333, or just under ¾ of an inch in width. A seven yard kilt makes a lot more sense for this gentleman.

What if our tartan had a very small sett of 4 inches? Four inches is really too small for an adult kilt, but let’s use it to illustrate the point. Remember, one sett - - one pleat.

Going back to our hypothetical man with the 44 inch hips, we need to cover 22 inches of his rumpus with pleats. How many pleats/setts will there be in 3 yards and 6 yards of material that has a four inch sett?

Answer: The five yard kilt will have 27 pleats/setts and the eight yard kilt will have 54..FIFTY FOUR pleats/setts.

So if se pleat normally, the 5 yard kilt will have 27 pleats covering 22 inches of rumpus for a pleat reveal of .8 inches….nice looking pleats, but the eight yard kilt will have FIFTY FOUR PLEATS, of .41 inches, or about 3/8 of an inch…..yuck! It will look horrible and take HOURS to sew up.

In fact, what I’d do if I HAD to make an “eight yard kilt” out of this stuff for this man is pleat double setts…two setts per pleat, which would give us 27 pleats and look EXACTLY*like the five yard kilt, though the “swing and swish” would be different.

WOW….long lecture. If you made it all the way through, I hope you’ve come to an understanding of the interaction of the three factors that will define how many pleats your kilt will have, and how deep they will be. It is NOT TRUE in all cases that a kilt with less material will have fewer pleats than a kilt with more material. The sett size has a large an effect on pleat depth and number of pleats and pleat reveal as the length of cloth that goes into your kilt.


As very, very general rules

1. larger setts result in deeper pleats, and fewer pleats
2. smaller setts result in more, shallower pleats UNLESS the kiltmaker decides to pleat to double setts.
3. If the kiltmaker pleats to double setts, you will get half the number of pleats, and the reveals will be wider.
4. more cloth results in deeper pleats, and smaller pleat reveals
5. the effect of “length of cloth” and “sett size” is very roughly the same in terms of determining how many pleats your kilt will have, and how big the reveals are.
6. The sett size is MORE important than the length of cloth in determining the depth of the pleats.
7. cloth costs money…thus more cloth costs more money
8. labor costs money, and sewing up pleats is labor
9. it’s easy to figure out roughly how many pleats your kilt will have, and roughly how deep they will be, if you know a. your hip measurement, b. the sett size of the cloth you’ve bought, and c. how much cloth you’ve bought.

slainte!

Alan

[Alan H]

Note: all of the above applies to knife pleat kilts. A similar principle applies to box pleat kilts, but it's less pronounced. Basically, unless you overlap the inner folds of the box pleats (which you absolutely can do, thereby making the box pleats smaller....and getting more of them...AND using up more material) the sett size totally determines the width of the pleat. You just assemble enough box pleats to go roughly round the back half of the guys rumpus, plus or minus an inch or two, and then make an over-apron sized appropriately to cover up what's left.

or at least, that's how I make 'em. Matt and others may do it differently.

[ardchoille]

Nice, thanks for posting this info.

Alan, have you made any 8 yard knife pleat kilts? I'd be anxious to see one if you ever do.

[Spc. Scott]

Good lecture Alan.

They say you learn something new everyday...it seems I'm picking up more like two or three a day when I get to log on here.

Thanks

[Alan H]

Nice, thanks for posting this info.

Alan, have you made any 8 yard knife pleat kilts? I'd be anxious to see one if you ever do.

I have made one, hand-sewn, "eight yard kilt" pleated to the sett. I made it in the Dutch Mackay Tartan for Piper George. His wife, the "Gwenlass" bought him the material and slipped it to me in secret in November of 2007. He got the kilt for Christmas 2007 and wore it to our Nor Cal Burns night this past year, so if you want to see it, you can go look up the Nor Cal Burns Night 2008 picture thread. Piper George piped in the Haggis for us, and the tartan has a lot of orange in it, for obvious reasons if you study your history.

Unfortunately the kilt was lost in the fire that destroyed his house this past summer. BTW, the Dutch MacKay tartan is only available in 10 ounce tartan, so I made it out of that and I thought it looked pretty good. I've since learned more about kiltmaking, and if I were to make another I'd go wit the same fabric, but change a few details about how I stitched it up.

My very first "traditional" kilt (I used some shortcuts, and it wasn't made out of worsted wool) was hand-sewn to Barbs instructions *more or less* and it's in the MacNicol, red, modern tartan. I stitched it up to stripe, it has 29 pleats, and I gave the leftover tartan to Panache and the F-H.C.A.G. who promptly turned it into a kilt for Sinbad, and a belt/sash for the lady. There's a pic of it in my gallery, and a *very* long thread, way, way back in the DIY forum where I wrote it out, blow by freaking blow....how I made it. It took me 47 hours of mostly hand-sewing. I still wear it a lot in the winter, though it's starting to show some strain in the stitching. I may go back through it at some point, and reinforce the things I took shortcuts in, as I like the kilt, itself quite a lot.

[ardchoille]

I have made one, hand-sewn, "eight yard kilt" pleated to the sett. I made it in the Dutch Mackay Tartan for Piper George. His wife, the "Gwenlass" bought him the material and slipped it to me in secret in November of 2007. He got the kilt for Christmas 2007 and wore it to our Nor Cal Burns night this past year, so if you want to see it, you can go look up the Nor Cal Burns Night 2008 picture thread. Piper gorge pipe in the Haggis for us, and the tartan has a lot of orange in it, for obvious reasons if you study your history.

Unfortunately the kilt was lost in the fire that destroyed his house this past summer. BTW, the Dutch MacKay tartan is only available in 10 ounce tartan, so I made it out of that and I thought it looked pretty good. I've since learned more about kiltmaking, and if I were to make another I'd go wit the same fabric, but change a few details about how I stitched it up.

My very first "traditional" kilt (I used some shortcuts, and it wasn't made out of worsted wool) was hand-sewn to Barbs instructions *more or less* and it's in the MacNicol, red, modern tartan. I stitched it up to stripe, it has 29 pleats, and I gave the leftover tartan to Panache and the F-H.C.A.G. who promptly turned it into a kilt for Sinbad, and a belt/sash for the lady. There's a pic of it in my gallery, and a *very* long thread, way, way back in the DIY forum where I wrote it out, blow by freaking blow....how I made it. It took me 47 hours of mostly hand-sewing. I still wear it a lot in the winter, though it's starting to show some strain in the stitching. I may go back through it at some point, and reinforce the things I took shortcuts in, as I like the kilt, itself quite a lot.

Ah, I have got to see these
Thanks again!