Any one use metric in your kilt making ?

[Barb T]

I'm a scientist, and I think in metric for everything in my life as a professional geologist.

For kiltmaking, I use inches and fractions, partly because I'm tickled by a tradition that didn't require apprentices to be able to do any kind of math at all. Even though I use math in everything I do professionally, I think it's pretty neat that kiltmaking can be done without some one being able to do any math at all. And, in fact, when I describe the traditional way of figuring out pleat size to people at Kilt Kamp as being simply a strategy of successive approximations using the associative property of multiplication (i.e., (20 x 1/2) + (20 x 1/4 ) = 20 (1/2 + 1/4), they look at me like I have two heads.

Totally doesn't matter whether you use mm or fractions of an inch as long as you have a measuring implement that will let you measure precisely enough.