The Polaris Kilt

This page will document the construction of my Polaris tartan kilt. This kilt will be pleated to the stripe. Elsie Scott Stuehmeyer is again conducting a kiltmaking workshop that I will take in late March / early April 2009. I'll try to be better at documenting the construction of this kilt than I was at documenting the first X Mark kilt.

So that my scissors remain mine, and Elsie's hers, and so that I have a place to stuff my pins and needles, I took a few minutes to do this little project.

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I approach this kilt with a bit of trepidation. This is the tartan that started me down this kiltmaking path. I want it to be a good kilt. Guess we'll see when it's done.

The K1 finish 16oz D.C. Dalgliesh tartan is SO much nicer to work with than the Fraser and Kirkbright tartan. The handle and the way the fabric works seem entirely different. The selvedge of the Polaris is a "proper" selvedge. On the X-Marks, the individual weft threads are cut about a half-inch from the edge on the return. This leaves a slight bump or ridge that is visible along the length of the tartan. The Polaris weft threads aren't cut until a color change so there isn't the ridge along the selvedge.

The way this tartan works makes it much easier to hide stiches of black thread in the black twill lines along the edge of a pleat. Miss Elsie was adamant that my goal should be to get a stitch into every one of those lines. Don't think I did it, but I think that the stitches along the pleats is pretty hard to see. Now, if I can only figure out how to keep the pleats straight and at the proper width.

I don't know why I haven't figured it out before, but when sewing the pleat, the pleat doesn't lie flat until it's sewn. So, when measuring and pinning a pleat for sewing, a little bit should be subtracted from the measurement because the pleat will be wider after it is sewn. This is especially true of narrow pleats. By the time I got all twenty eight of my pleats sewn, I was an inch and half longer than I should be. Didn't have to rip it all out and start over, thankfully, because I can tweak the position of the buckles to get around that.

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Last modified: 2009 Apr 06 1509:17 UTC