Pleating to Horizontal ?!

[mookien]

Barb T.: Thanks for your comments. They make sense and help me understand pleating a bit more, but I'm not about to get between Drs. Tewksbury and Fiddes in a kilt-making discussion. :-)

That's a beautiful Douglas kilt (the Clan of my family, by the way) and makes obvious what you write about "subdued color differences" and non-stripeyness. My brother has an Ancient Douglas and I'll be sure to point him to your post.

[Brian K]

Barb T.: Thanks for your comments. They make sense and help me understand pleating a bit more, but I'm not about to get between Drs. Tewksbury and Fiddes in a kilt-making discussion. :-)

That's a beautiful Douglas kilt (the Clan of my family, by the way) and makes obvious what you write about "subdued color differences" and non-stripeyness. My brother has an Ancient Douglas and I'll be sure to point him to your post.

It's entirely possible that Barb and Nick are both correct, but just coming at the problem from two different angles.

The Douglas example Barb showed did look good because it minimizes the "lawn chair effect." The subtle difference between the blue and green is probably the principal reason it is pleasing rather than jarring. It seems to me that when Nick referred to not asking a novice to do this he possibly meant that an experienced kilt maker might try to steer you away from such a pleating method if she/he realized it would broaden your beam, so to speak. It also could be that if there is a more pleasing way of pleating to the horizontal or the no stripe than another he/she would make sure you were aware of it.

I have a friend who was a hair dresser before he became an English teacher. He was in great demand and could pretty much charge what he wanted because he really knew what he was doing when it came to hair. If a client asked him do do something he knew would end hideously he would refuse to do it. He would try to steer them towards something else that would give a more pleasing result. He assumed that if you were paying him as much as he charged then he owed it to you to give you the benefit of his wisdom and experience. He lost very few clients this way and most were grateful that he helped prevent them from making a mistake. If I were paying for a garment as expensive as a bespoke kilt I would expect my kilt maker to use similarly good judgment to keep me from making a visually unfortunate mistake.

I'm not trying to climb into Nick's head, but that's how reading his words struck me.

Brian