Pleating Army tartan to stripe

[Barb T]

Sorry I'm late coming to this thread. I agree completely with Matt and Rocky. It _really_ depends on the tartan. The Isle of Skye that I made for Turpin works because the colors overall are muted and blend together, reducing the "lawn chair" or "painted fence" effect. The MacCallum works because the dark green on one side of the light blue stripe and the black on the other are comparable in tone, making the light blue stripe the most prominent thing you see.

Asking the kiltmaker to offer his/her opinion is a good thing, unless you happen to have a piece of that tartan handy. I typically try out several choices to see what looks good, and I'll commonly scan an option or two for a client to choose from.

But, truly - the only way to know what it will look good is to try it on the tartan _and stand back a ways to see the overall effect_. I can't emphasize the latter enough! I typically drape it on the back of the couch and stand 15' away at least to see what it looks like. Even the tartan by itself looks different from a distance than it does up close, and overall color effects that don't show up when you look at a swatch in your hand can be very prominent at a distance.

As an aside, if you did the US Army tartan to the brown stripe, the colors on either side have quite different color values, and you'd have more than one prominent vertical stripe. I'm not sure I'd like that. The option to pleat to every brown stripe so that pleats alternate (as in the post by cloves) is not often done and, I think, would not be considered "proper" pleating to the stripe. I've seen it occasionally on Black Watch kilts to get around the enormous sett (a pleat with a single black stripe alternating with a pleat that has a double black stripe). But I do remember thinking, when I saw it, "Wow, that's odd."

Cheers,

Barb