very narrow color blocks

[Barb T]

Ah, right! I'd forgotten about the little blue stripes, and I didn't notice them in the pic you posted. Sorry about that!

Did you try pinning up pleating to the blue block? I think it would be worth a try just to pin 5 or 6 pleats. Any tartan pleated to a solid color block will have a horizontal, but it isn't necessarily objectionable (i.e., doesn't always give the cringeworthy lawnchair...). Here's one example of a tartan that looks fine, no lawn chair, even though it has a very strong horizontal:


Do you want to pin up your tartan and take a quick pic and post it?

Gaaah! Sorry for the duplicate uploads of the same pic earlier. Our internet is glacially slow here, and nothing happened for FOREVER, so I tried uploading again. It was obviously busy in the background for the hour it took to get uploads in......

[daibhidh]

Wow, that’s magnificent!

Here’s a pinned pleating to the blue block:

Not sure how bad lawn chair can get, but feels pretty bad.

I was able to find a way to pleat to the sett, number of pleats goes down quite a bit. It’s still pretty hard to find elements to center and edge, but it works.

[Barb T]

The critical thing is that YOU have to like it. So, if it feels too "lawnchair-y" to you, then you don't want to pleat it that way!

And yes - you will get fewer pleats when you pleat to the sett, because pleating to the stripe gives 1 pleat per sett, whereas, when you pleat to the sett, you have to go over a full sett plus an inch or so (depends on the pleat size), so I figure roughly 3-4 fewer pleats when I pleat to the sett.

Anyway, good for you to figure out the pleating. I think you'll be happy with pleating to the sett!

[Flyboy]

Please excuse my novice kilt making ignorance but what is “lawnchairy” refer to ?

[Barb T]

The back of a kilt with the "dreaded lawn chair effect" looks like one of those folding lawn chairs that has the striped plastic webbing, comme ça:


You can avoid the lawn chair effect if you do a test folding of the tartan ahead of time and stand back to see what it looks like - ugh, lawn chair....




so that you can avoid making the kilt and then discovering the lawn chair...

[Flyboy]

Ah yes I get the reference now, thanks for the visuals it makes it so much clearer now.

[Katia]

so that you can avoid making the kilt and then discovering the lawn chair...

To be fair, that one more says "beach towel" to me. (What tartan is that?)

[Barb T]

Our legacy beach towels trend more toward The Little Mermaid or volcanoes or puffins....with the occasional shark towel...

And you’re probably way too classy to have ever had one of those plastic webbing lawn chairs . And I’m not sure they even sell them any more! I think you have to be “of a certain age”, as they say, to understand the reference. “Older than dirt” is how I phrased it to my five year old grandson once. He paused for a nanno and then asked, “Babaa, how old is dirt?” Once I’d stopped giggling, I had to, as a geologist, tell him that dirt is pretty darned old...