Montgomery Blue\Green Pleating

[Barb T]

Remember that an element is normally centered in a pleat in a kilt pleated to the stripe, and there's a mirror line running down the center of each pleat with one half the mirror image of the other. So, you normally wouldn't put the blue/green boundary down the center of the pleat and make one half of the pleat blue and the other green.

On another thing, whenever you do this kind of PhotoShopping to see if a pleating looks good, you really have to know what the width of the stripes are in inches. If you don't know the width of the stripes, you can't actually know what the pleating will look like. When I do this kind of thing, I assume a pleat width at the hips of about 3/4-7/8", because that's typical for a guy's kilt. If the green stripe is 1/4" across, that leaves 1/4" on each side that's dark blue. If, on the other hand, the green stripe is 1/2" across, that leaves only 1/8" of blue on each side. A very different look altogether.

Here's an example from a tartan design that I critiqued awhile back for ScotWeb. If you took a casual look at the tartan, you might think it would look great pleated to the green stripe, and you could pick chunks so that the kilt would pleat up like example "C" below. As it happens, the sett is big enough that that effect could only be accomplished in a box pleated kilt. If you made a knife-pleated kilt with normal-sized pleats, the pleats would be entirely within the light cluster, giving the actual look of example A if you pleated to the green stripe. If you didn't know what the size of the stripes were, you wouldn't have an accurate picture of what the pleating would look like.



And you really have to take tapered chunks of the tartan (not strips with parallel sides) so that you can see what it will look like if the pleats taper between the hips and the waist. Taper can eliminate a narrow color band along the edge of a pleat, and that doesn't look good.

So - if you really want to see what the kilt will look like, before you can do the PhotoShop thing, you need to know how big the stripes are, and you need to account for pleat taper.

The Montgomery might be a great tartan to pleat to the "no stripe" (i.e., the wide green block).