Box Pleat

[Alan H]

Why don't you want to cut the material above the fell? It is useless material and is better to remove and replace it with some interfacing to add stiffness.

1. it's more work
2. I don't know about "useless", but you're right, it's certainly not visible on the outside of the kilt and doesn't contribute to how the kilt hangs. However, this kilt will be about 4 yards. The amount of cloth layered in the fell in this kilt will be about the same as would be layered in a knife-pleat, 4 yarder. It's not THAT much. Now, I if were building an 8 yard knife pleat, then you bet I'd cut it out!

I have found that I like my box pleats to be between 2" and 3.5" wide at the hip. I can go more than 3.5" if the man I'm making the kilt for is a larger man. Otherwise, it just wouldn't look proportionate. But anything less than 2" and the pleat tends not to hold as well (since the pleat depth is going to be roughly 1/2 of the width of the pleat).

A "true" box pleat will have little or no overlap between the pleats. A pefect pleat, therefore, assuming you are pleating to stripe, will be 1/3 the size of the total sett repeat.

In fact this will be about 2.5 inches wide at the waist and 3.33 inches wide at the hip. It will have no overlap at all at the hip, and maximum overlap at the waist. The thing about box pleats is that you have to build in a LOTof taper into each pleat, since there aren't very many pleats. This is going to work out, but just *barely*!