How to form pleats in your wool kilt.

My dear friend Rene (pronounced Renny) moved to Lincoln a while back.  He and his lovely family are from Scotland. Well, some of the kids were born in the USA, but by all means are Scottish.  Rene brought with him his well worn, genuine Scottish kilt. It needed a little TLC so I told him I was up to the challenge. 

As I mentioned above, this kilt has been well worn and as any good Scotsman would tell you, wearing a kilt is not only a tradition, but is comfortable too. As you can see, the pleats are basically non-existant, it also needed a bit of mending and loose threads trimmed. This kilt is made of wool, so ironing is out.  I have been told you should never use a hot iron directly on wool.....However, you can carefully lay your kilt on an ironing board and form the pleats by folding them back to where they originally were. You then take a lint free towel, I use a flour sack towel, wet it and wring out the excess water. Make sure you have water in your iron to the maximum fill line, (check your owners manual to see if you should be using distilled water) you will most likely use all of the water during the steaming process. When you have your pleats lined up, place the wet towel on the kilt, with the iron on the steam setting, CAREFULLY hover the iron over the towel, holding it as close to the towel as possible without touching. When you are done with a section, put a heavy object on the towel while the fabric is cooling. I used a large, very full, three ring binder. Make sure you use something that can get wet, my binder has a plastic cover, so the hot steam didn't do any damage. You may need to go over a section a couple of times. It took me about 45 minutes to steam the pleats back into the kilt. I was also removing  already existing lint from the kilt as I went along, so it took a little while. Since this is the first time I've ever worked with a kilt, I thought it turned out pretty nice.  Thankfully, so did Rene.