Pleating to the sett, am I doing it right?

[Barb T]

Pleating to the sett is a combination of reproducing the sett as closely as possible while still keeping each pleat well-balanced and not losing stripes in the taper of the pleats from the hips to the waist. Pleat size and balance are the two most critical things. Whether you exactly reproduce the sett isn't as important. If you have the overall pattern, but one color element is wider or narrower than it is in the sett, it frankly is not going to be at all noticeable.

What I typically do is lay out a test apron with pins and then go to the center back of the tartan. I count the number of pleats that I could get into the kilt if I were pleating to the stripe (in the case of the MacGregor, the number of white stripes), and then I subtract 3. That gives me roughly how many pleats I might be able to get by pleating to the sett. Then I figure out what the pleat size will be at the hips and the waist. If you don't do that, you can easily lay out a pleating and a pleat size that you don't have enough tartan for. Knowing how much the pleats have to taper is also critical to avoid "spear points" along the edges of the pleats.

Then I start at a pivot for the center back and choose elements that are the right width at the hips _and_ that will accommodate taper without spear points _and_ are balanced (solid color, stripe up the center, or stripe up the pleat edge). AND pleats on opposite sides of a pivot MUST be mirror images of one another. Takes some fiddling, but it simply can't be done mathematically.