I'm starting the planning stages on a bliaut and I've been looking at Arianne de Chateaumichel's page (http://www.chateau-michel.org/bliaut_class.htm). She suggests using pin-pleats for the skirt, but what is a pin-pleat? And how does one do it?
Isn't it... erm... like box pleats, except all the pleats go in the same direction? Or is that knife pleats?
Someone should make a pleating guide, with picture examples! Wikipedia has some stuff, but it's a general guide. Would be lovely to have a historical-clothes-related guide... HINT-HINT!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleats
That is such a great idea. As I have never heard of pleating until a couple of weeks ago, thanks you some of our wonderful members here.
All I can tell you now is that there is more than one type of pleat, but nothing more.
I may be remembering this way wrong as this was over 20 years ago. An older friend used to do heirloom embroidery. I think I remember the tiny pleats that she used to make for shirts, pin pleats. And the reason it was called that is that you used pins to make and hold the tiny pleats in place while stitching them down.
See, I have always called that pin tucks instead of pin pleats. Maybe just a case of semantics...
Margaret, the difference in the tuck and the pleating (from her) was that the pleat was actually folded by the pin, and a tuck was material "randomly" folded under. I agree with you on the usage tho. :D
Couldn't I just do really small knife pleats? I looked up pin tucks and it seems a lot like knife pleating, only you sew it all the way down. Which I don't want to do on my bliaut cause that makes no sense. On the Chartres and Angers Cathedral statues, some skirts look knife pleated and some look box pleated to me.
Sara, the link in your original post is broken; maybe if we could see the original source we might have a better idea what she means?
Oops, I didn't realize that. It's fixed now!
You might find this link useful: http://www.lulu.com/content/1255610