very narrow color blocks

[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...

[OC Richard]

Not a kiltmaker, but I will say that I always prefer pleating to a line or pleating to a block over pleating to the sett.

There are two things I like about pleating to a line or block:

1) It gives you two different "looks" in the same kilt.

2) It follows the principle of Form Follows Function.

As I've often said, I do recognise that there are certain tartans the effect of which is dependent on being able to see all the colours in their normal proportions, where IMHO no pleating other than pleating to the sett looks good.

With Hollyrood, pleating to the blue block seems to naturally present itself. Seems to me that pleating it to all those lines results in busy pleats.

With my Isle Of Skye it's cheating in a way, at first glance it appears to be pleated to the block but the blocks have subtle lines in them. I saw somebody else wearing an IOS pleated that way, it's my favourite approach to pleating this tartan, perhaps because it best maintains the tartan's colour-balance.

[jhead7090]

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...

My mother, rest her soul, had 2 of them on her patio in fact their still there. And you can actually still get them at amazon, of course the price has gone up.