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Bravehearts' Kilt Forum
Tartan weights
Posted By: Dave (host86-148-194-11.range86-148.btcentralplus.com)
In Response To: Re: A minor critiwm of "The Art of Kilt Making". (r.m.anderson)
Date: 9/25/09 06:18
Thank you all for your comments, my question is mostly out of curiosity as what I can find on the web doesn’t add up. (Its based on 54 inch wide fabric.) Maybe I should invest in a copy of the kiltmaking book.
I have 3 kilts and a bolt of tartan ready for the next one. 2 medium weight and one heavy weight which I was told was 16 oz when I bought it. So I did some measuring and weighing. I measured along the selvage of each kilt and the drop to get the square yardage. I know that some material is cut away round the waste but the lining and buckles will approximately balance that out. Then I calculated the weight per linear yard corrected to 54 inch wide fabric.
Here is the result. Medium weight kilts 13.5 oz and 14 oz. Heavy weight kilt 18.5 oz and the bale of tartan 14.5 oz. The most accurately measured was the bale which looks and feels like medium weight so I seriously doubt 14.5 oz. Also my heavyweight came out very high.
My conclusion is that it is all based on a bale width of 48 inch and that’s a non standard width. However, that would give me medium weights of 12 to 13 oz and the heavy weight at 16.5 oz per linear yard (buckles, straps and lining minus the cut aways might push it that far.) Could it be that 6 inches of selvage would normally be lost as unusable, not so with kilt tartan however.
So I am still confused.
What started all this is that my wife bought me a cheap kilt on a special offer from the German supermarket Lidl. It is wool not acrylic. The Acrylic ones were even cheaper. She dismantled the whole thing as it was not cut straight and rebuilt it - about 100 hours of work on it. Well, it was an outsize one cut down to fit me. The pleats were already cut away at the waste but she managed to maintain the tartan pattern round the back very well. One other thing was that it did not have the pattern woven right out to the edge of the selvage so it had to have a hem. My wifes opinion of that is that it hangs better and kilts probably have no hem to save the work involved in blind hemming 9 or 10 yards. As a youngster my kilts all had hems till I grew enough to need the full length. Didn’t seem to matter.
So, anyone prepared to get the tape out and see what your kilts weigh?
Dave
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