An interesting example of pleating to stripe

[JRB]

Very, very nice. The pleats look perfect. This thread makes me wonder, are there a lot of tartans out there that are problematic when it comes to pleating to sett or to a specific stripe?

[Barb T]

Most don't present many problems, actually. The rare asymmetric tartans are the biggest nightmare for a kiltmaker. But some of the most common tartans (e.g., Black Watch and many of those based on the Black Watch) have the same ABAC sett issue as the Weathered Stewart Old Sett, and, depending upon how the loom was originally set up, the setts can be big. With the Black Watch family tartans, it's commonly possible to "cheat the pleats" and have a pleat every half sett and still pleat accurately to the sett. Even so, it's often necessary to have one or two full sett pleats, which are twice as deep (which doesn't show from the outside of the kilt.)

The only way for a weaver to reduce the sett size in a piece of tartan is to reduce the size of each stripe and block proportionately before threading the loom. There are some limits, though. Each stripe and block contains an even number of threads, so it's commonly easy to halve the sett size but almost impossible to reduce it by, say, 1/3. And no stripe can be less than two threads wide. This latter is the problem with the Weathered Stewart Old Sett. The red stripe is only two threads wide. There's no way to cut down on the size of the sett because there's no way to reduce the red stripe any further. And reducing everything _but_ the red stripe wouldn't preserve the proportions of the tartan.

Cheers,

Barb