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69-544: The Northern Meeting was set up in 1798 "for the purpose of promoting a Social Intercourse", and early editions featured dinners, balls, concerts, and horse races. "An exhibition of Pipers and Dancers" was included in the 1841 meeting, and in 1848 the Highland Society of London donated a Gold Medal , after their own piping competition ceased in 1844. In 1789 the Northern Meeting built its own rooms on

138-524: A sett . Scottish tartan was originally associated with the Highlands . Early tartans were only particular to locales, rather than any specific Scottish clan ; however, because clans lived in and controlled particular districts and regions, then informally, people could roughly identify certain clans and families through the patterns associated with their own locality. Like other materials, tartan designs were produced by local weavers for local tastes, using

207-830: A visual perception of depth. There is no set of exact colour standards for tartan hues; thread colour varies from weaver to weaver even for "the same" colour. A certain range of general colours, however, are traditional in Scottish tartan. These include blue (dark), crimson (rose or dark red), green (medium-dark), black, grey (medium-dark), purple, red (scarlet or bright), tan/brown, white (actually natural undyed wool, called lachdann in Gaelic), and yellow. Some additional colours that have been used more rarely are azure (light or sky blue), maroon, and vert (bright or grass green), plus light grey (as seen in Balmoral tartan, though it

276-426: A "harmonious balance". According to Scarlett (1990): "The colours were clear, bright and soft, altogether unlike the eye-searing brilliance or washed-out dullness of modern tartans". The same tartan in the same palette from two manufacturers (e.g. Colquhoun muted from D. C. Dalgliesh and from Strathmore) will not precisely match; there is considerable artistic license involved in exactly how saturated to make

345-422: A balanced and traditional style: any basic tartan type of design should have for its background, a "high impact" colour and two others, of which one should be the complement to the first and the other a darker and more neutral shade; other colours, introduced to break up the pattern or as accents, should be a matter of taste. It is important that no colour should be so strong as to "swamp" another; otherwise,

414-433: A colour key/legend . Some recorders prefer to begin a thread count at the pivot with the colour name (or abbreviation) that is first in alphabetical order (e.g. if there is a white pivot and a blue one, begin with blue), but this is actually arbitrary. Though thread counts are quite specific, they can be modified depending on the desired size of the tartan. For example, the sett of a tartan (e.g., 6 inches square –

483-404: A comparatively rougher and denser (though also thinner) material than is now typical for kilts. It was in common use up until the 1830s. There are extant but uncommon samples of hard tartan from the early 18th century that use the more intricate herringbone instead of twill weave throughout the entire cloth. While modern tartan is primarily a commercial enterprise on large power looms , tartan

552-409: A constrained set of basic codes (but expanded upon the above traditional list, with additional options like dark orange, dark yellow, light purple, etc.). This helps designers fit their creative tartan into a coding scheme while allowing weavers to produce an approximation of that design from readily stocked yarn supplies. In the mid-19th century, the natural dyes that had been traditionally used in

621-433: A defined sequence. The sequence of the warp colours (long-ways threads) is repeated in same order and size in the weft (cross-ways threads). The majority of such patterns (or setts) are symmetrical, i.e. the pattern repeats in the same colour order and proportions in every direction from the two pivot points. In the less common asymmetric patterns, the colour sequence repeats in blocks as opposed to around alternating pivots but

690-501: A firm but not harsh contrast and the overchecks will be such as to show clearly" on the under-check (or "background") colours. He summed up the desired total result as "a harmonious blend of colour and pattern worthy to be looked upon as an art form in its own right". Omitting traditional black lines has a strong softening effect, as in the 1970s Missoni fashion ensemble (top right) and in many madras patterns (see § Indian madras , below) . A Scottish black-less design (now

759-450: A halftone blend or mixture  – when viewed from further back. (The effect is similar to multicolour halftone printing, or cross-hatching in coloured-pencil art.) Thus, a set of two base colours produces three different colours including one blend, increasing quadratically with the number of base colours; so a set of six base colours produces fifteen blends and a total of twenty-one different perceived colours. This means that

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828-1230: A hue. Tartan-generation software can approximate the appearance of a tartan in any of these palettes. The examples below are all the "Prince Charles Edward Stuart" tartan: Scottish tartans that use two or more hues of the same basic colour are fairly rare. The best known is the British royal family's Balmoral (1853, two greys, both as under-check  – see illustration at § Family and individual , below ). Others include: Akins (1850, two reds, one as over-check and sometimes rendered purple), MacBean (1872, two reds, one as over-check and sometimes rendered purple), Childers Universal regimental (1907, two greens, both under-check), Gordon red (recorded 1930–1950 but probably considerably older; two blues and two reds, one of each used more or less as over-checks), Galloway district hunting/green (1939/1950s, two greens, both under-check), US Air Force Reserve Pipe Band (1988, two blues, both under-check), McCandlish (1992, three variants, all under-check), Isle of Skye district (1992, three greens, all arguably under-check, nested within each other), and Chisholm Colonial (2008, two blues, one an over-check,

897-400: A pivot colour; this was typically done with pieces intended to be joined (e.g. for a belted plaid or a blanket) to make larger spans of cloth with the pattern continuing across the seam; if the tartan had a selvedge mark or selvedge pattern, it was at the other side of the warp. The term hard tartan refers to a version of the cloth woven with very tightly wound, non-fuzzy thread, producing

966-420: A shorthand threadcount for simple tartans in which half of the half-sett pattern is different from the other only in the way of a colour swap; but this is not a common style of thread-counting. Various writers and tartan databases do not use a consistent set of colour names (see § Colour, palettes, and meaning , below) and abbreviations, so a thread count may not be universally understandable without

1035-434: A slight variation on weathered , dating to the 1940s and claimed to be based on 18th-century samples. A general observation about ancient/old , weathered/faded , and muted are that they rather uniformly reduce the saturation of all colours, while actual natural-dyed tartan samples show that the historical practice was usually to pair one or more saturated colours with one or more pale ones, for greater clarity and depth,

1104-706: A striped rather than checked appearance in some tartan samples. The predominant colours of a tartan (the widest bands) are called the under-check (or under check , undercheck , under-cheque ); sometimes the terms ground , background , or base are used instead, especially if there is only one dominant colour. Thin, contrasting lines are referred to as the over-check (also over-stripe or overstripe ). Over-checks in pairs are sometimes referred to as tram lines , tramlines , or tram tracks . Bright over-checks are sometimes bordered on either side (usually both), for extra contrast, by additional thin lines, often black, called guard lines or guards . Historically,

1173-454: A typical size for kilts) may be too large to fit upon the face of a necktie . In this case, the thread count would be reduced in proportion (e.g. to 3 inches to a side). In some works, a thread count is reduced to the smallest even number of threads (often down to 2) required to accurately reproduce the design; in such a case, it is often necessary to up-scale the thread count proportionally for typical use in kilts and plaids. Before

1242-410: A view to broad, general tartan use, including for fashion: "Color – and how it is worked – is pivotal to tartan design.... Thus, tartans should be composed of clear, bright colors, but ones sufficiently soft to blend well and thereby create new shades." James D. Scarlett (2008) noted: "the more colours to begin with, the more subdued the final effect", or put more precisely, "the more stripes to

1311-515: Is a charity registered in England and Wales , with "the view of establishing and supporting schools in the Highlands and in the Northern parts of Great Britain, for relieving distressed Highlanders at a distance from their native homes, for preserving the antiquities and rescuing from oblivion the valuable remains of Celtic literature, and for promoting the improvement and general welfare of

1380-491: Is a simple two-colour check of thick bands (with or without thin over-checks of one or more other colours). A variant on this splits one or more of the bands, to form squares of smaller squares instead of just big, solid squares; a style heavily favoured in Vestiarium Scoticum . A complexity step up is the superimposed check, in which a third colour is placed centrally "on top of" or "inside" (surrounded by) one of

1449-502: Is commonly used to refer to tartan. Plaid , derived from the Scottish Gaelic plaide meaning 'blanket', was first used of any rectangular garment, sometimes made up of tartan, which could be worn several ways: the belted plaid ( breacan féile ) or "great kilt" which preceded the modern kilt ; the arisaid ( earasaid ), a large shawl that could be wrapped into a dress; and several types of shoulder cape, such as

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1518-592: Is currently held in early September, one or two weeks after the Argyllshire Gathering in Oban . Many pipers come to Scotland to compete in both events. Other events throughout the year include reel parties, cocktail parties and lunches. The annual solo bagpiping competitions at the Northern Meeting are among the most prestigious in the calendar, especially the competition for the Gold Medal donated by

1587-443: Is made with alternating bands of coloured (pre-dyed) threads woven in usually matching warp and weft in a simple 2/2 twill pattern. Up close, this pattern forms alternating short diagonal lines where different colours cross; from further back, it gives the appearance of new colours blended from the original ones. The resulting blocks of colour repeat vertically and horizontally in a distinctive pattern of rectangles and lines known as

1656-483: Is only recently created tartans, such as Canadian provincial and territorial tartans (beginning 1950s) and US state tartans (beginning 1980s), that are stated to be designed with certain symbolic meaning for the colours used. For example, green sometimes represents prairies or forests, blue can represent lakes and rivers, and yellow might stand for various crops. In the Scottish Register of Tartans (and

1725-616: Is particularly associated with Scotland , and Scottish kilts almost always have tartan patterns. The earliest surviving samples of tartan-style cloth are around 3,000 years old and were discovered in Xinjiang , China. Outside of Scotland, tartan is sometimes also known as " plaid " (particularly in North America); however, in Scotland, a plaid is a large piece of tartan cloth which can be worn several ways. Traditional tartan

1794-467: Is recorded by counting the threads of each colour that appear in the sett. The thread count (or threadcount , thread-count ) not only describes the width of the stripes on a sett, but also the colours used (typically abbreviated). Usually every number in a thread count is an even number to assist in manufacture. The first and last threads of the thread count are the pivots. A thread count combined with exact colour information and other weaving details

1863-520: Is referred to as a ticket stamp or simply ticket . There is no universally standardised way to write a thread count, but the different systems are easy to distinguish. As a simple example: In all of these cases, the result is a half-sett thread count, which represents the threading before the pattern mirrors and completes; a full-sett thread count for a mirroring (symmetric) tartan is redundant. A "/" can also be used between two colour codes (e.g. "W/Y24" for "white/yellow 24") to create even more of

1932-485: Is sometimes given as lavender). Since the opening of the tartan databases to registration of newly designed tartans, including many for organisational and fashion purposes, a wider range of colours have been involved, such as orange and pink, which were not often used (as distinct colours rather than as renditions of red) in old traditional tartans. The Scottish Register of Tartans uses a long list of colours keyed to hexadecimal " Web colours ", sorting groups of hues into

2001-473: Is sometimes not a new colour but one of the under-check colours "on top of" the other under-check. A rare style, traditionally used for arisaid ( earasaid ) tartans but no longer in much if any Scottish use, is a pattern consisting entirely of thin over-checks, sometimes grouped, "on" a single ground colour, usually white. M. Martin (1703) reported that the line colours were typically blue, black, and red. Examples of this style do not survive, at least not in

2070-419: Is unrelated to the superficially similar word tarlatan , which refers to a very open-weave muslin similar to cheesecloth . Tartan is both a mass noun ("12 metres of tartan") and a count noun ("12 different tartans"). Today, tartan refers to coloured patterns, though originally did not have to be made up of a pattern at all, as it referred to the type of weave; as late as the 1820s, some tartan cloth

2139-691: The Highland Society of London . A maximum of between 25 and 35 pipers are in each competition. The Senior piping competitions consist of three pibroch competitions and five light music competitions. The pibroch competitions are for the Gold Medal, the Silver Medal, and the Clasp for former winners of the Gold Medal. For light music, there are March, Strathspey and Reel competitions for A and B grades as well as one for former winners, and A and B grade Hornpipe and Jig competitions. Eligibility for

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2208-547: The Low Countries , with which Scotland had extensive trade since the 15th century. Aged human urine (called fual or graith ) was also used, as a colour-deepener, a dye solubility agent, a lichen fermenter , and a final colour-fastness treatment. All commercially manufactured tartan today is coloured using artificial not natural dyes, even in the less saturated colour palettes. The hues of colours in any established tartan can be altered to produce variations of

2277-580: The Mar dress tartan) dates to the 18th century; another is Ruthven (1842, above ), and many of the Ross tartans (e.g. 1886, above ), as well as several of the Victorian–Edwardian MacDougal[l] designs, are further examples. Various modern tartans also use this effect, e.g. Canadian Maple Leaf (1964, at § Regional , below ). Clever use of black or another dark colour can produce

2346-555: The Northern Meeting and Argyllshire Gathering . Its early records are deposited in the National Library of Scotland . Tartans Tartan ( Scottish Gaelic : breacan [ˈpɾʲɛxkən] ) is a patterned cloth with crossing horizontal and vertical bands in multiple colours, forming simple or complex rectangular patterns. Tartans originated in woven wool, but are now made in other materials. Tartan

2415-456: The full plaid and fly plaid . In time, plaid was used to describe blankets themselves. In former times, the term plaiding or pladding was sometimes used to refer to tartan cloth. The Scottish Register of Tartans provides the following summary definition of tartan: Tartan (the design) is a pattern that comprises two or more different solid-coloured stripes that can be of similar but are usually of differing proportions that repeat in

2484-634: The 18th century, and Russia (sometimes with gold and silver thread) since at least the early 19th century. Maasai shúkà wraps, Bhutanese mathra weaving, and Indian madras cloth are also often in tartan patterns, distinct from the Scottish style. The English and Scots word tartan is possibly derived from French tiretaine meaning ' linsey-woolsey cloth'. Other hypotheses are that it derives from Scottish Gaelic tarsainn or tarsuinn , meaning 'across' or 'crossing over'; or from French tartarin or tartaryn (occurring in 1454 spelled tartyn ) meaning ' Tartar cloth '. It

2553-432: The 19th century, tartan was often woven with thread for the weft that was up to 1/3 thicker than the fine thread used for the warp, which would result in a rectangular rather than square pattern; the solution was to adjust the weft thread count to return the pattern to square, or make it non-square on purpose, as is still done in a handful of traditional tartans. Uneven warp-and-weft thread thickness could also contribute to

2622-566: The Ball and piping competitions have been held in venues around Inverness, except for between 2005 and 2007 when the piping competition was held in Aviemore due to the renovation of Eden Court Theatre . In 1926 there were 850 people attending the ball. The bicentenary in 1988 was celebrated with a week of events reminiscent of earlier gatherings, with the centre-piece being a ball at Beaufort Castle attended by 1000 people. The piping competition

2691-543: The Highlands (like various lichens , alder bark, bilberry , cochineal , heather , indigo , woad , and yellow bedstraw ) began to be replaced by artificial dyes , which were easier to use and were more economic for the booming tartan industry, though also less subtle. Although William Morris in the late-19th-century Arts and Crafts movement tried to revive use of British natural dyes, most were so low-yield and so inconsistent from locality to locality (part of

2760-599: The Northern parts of Great Britain". The society was founded in 1778 by Highland gentlemen resident in London and was incorporated by an act of Parliament , the Highland Society of London Act 1816 ( 56 Geo. 3 . c. xx) on 21 May 1816. Within a year of its foundation, its members had come to include a number of notable Scots: The Presidents over the first 25 years of the Society's existence were: In 1782,

2829-615: The Senior competitions is decided by a Joint Eligibility Committee, comprising representatives of the Northern Meeting, the Argyllshire Gathering, competition judges and the Competing Pipers Association . There are also Junior competitions, with piobaireach and March, Strathspey and Reel (MSR) for under 15 and under 18 age grades. Highland Society of London The Highland Society of London

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2898-624: The Society was instrumental in securing the repeal of the Dress Act 1746 , the statutory proscription of Highland Dress , introduced after the Jacobite rising of 1745 . It has a well known and definitive collection of clan tartans established in the early 19th century. In its early days it was active in the investigations into the authenticity of the poems supposedly by Ossian , which it had also helped to publish. The Society supports and awards annual prizes for piping , including gold medals at

2967-441: The base under-check colours, providing a pattern of nested squares, which might then also have thin, bright and/or black over-checks added. Another group is multiple checks, typically of two broad bands of colour on a single dominant "background" (e.g. red, blue, red, green, red – again possibly with contrasting narrow over-checks). The aforementioned types can be combined into more complex tartans. In any of these styles, an over-check

3036-634: The blending of colours at the crossing will be adversely affected. ... Tartan is a complex abstract art-form with a strong mathematical undertone, far removed from a simple check with a few lines of contrasting colours scattered over it. Scarlett (1990) provided a more general explanation, traditional styles aside: Colours for tartan work require to be clear and unambiguous and bright but soft, to give good contrast of both colour and brightness and to mix well so as to give distinctly new shades where two colours cross without any one swamping another. Further, Scarlett (1990) held that "background checks will show

3105-683: The corner of Church Street and Baron Taylor's Street, and in 1864 the Northern Meeting Park in the centre of Inverness was established as a venue for the Highland Games . The Highland Games ceased to be run by the members of the Northern Meeting with the onset of World War II , and in 1946 the Northern Meeting Park was sold to Inverness Burgh Council who took over responsibility for running the Games and renamed it "The Inverness Highland Games" The rooms were sold in 1962 and since then

3174-426: The edge, 1–3 inches (2.5–7.6 cm) wide, but still fitting into the colour pattern of the sett; a few modern weavers will still produce some tartan in this style. Sometimes more decorative selvedges were used: Selvedge marks were borders (usually on one side only) formed by repeating a colour from the sett in a broad band (often in herringbone), sometimes further bordered by a thin strip of another colour from

3243-588: The fabric. The very rare total border is an all-four-sides selvedge of a completely different sett; described by Peter Eslea MacDonald (2019) as "an extraordinarily difficult feature to weave and can be regarded as the zenith of the tartan weaver's art", it only survives in Scottish-style tartan as a handful of 18th-century samples (in Scotland and Nova Scotia , Canada, but probably all originally from Scotland). The style has also been used in Estonia in

3312-445: The latter type is cheek or cheeck pattern. Also, some tartans (very few among traditional Scottish tartans) do not have exactly the same sett for the warp and weft. This means the warp and weft will have differing thread counts (see below) . Asymmetric and differing-warp-and-weft patterns are more common in madras cloth (see § Indian madras , below) and some other weaving traditions than in Scottish tartan. A tartan

3381-404: The longer term setting is occasionally used. Sett can refer to either the minimal visual presentation of the complete tartan pattern or to a textual representation of it (in a thread count ). Today tartan is used more generally to describe the pattern, not limited to textiles, appearing on media such as paper, plastics, packaging, and wall coverings. In North America, the term plaid

3450-416: The material is examined closely, is a characteristic 45-degree diagonal pattern of "ribs" where different colours cross. Where a thread in the weft crosses threads of the same colour in the warp, this produces a solid colour on the tartan, while a weft thread crossing warp threads of a different colour produces an equal admixture of the two colours alternating, producing the appearance of a third colour –

3519-410: The more stripes and colours used, the more blurred and subdued the tartan's pattern becomes. Unlike in simple checker (chequer) or dicing patterns (like a chessboard), no solid colour in a tartan appears next to another solid colour, only a blend (solid colours may touch at their corners). James D. Scarlett (2008) offered a definition of a usual tartan pattern (some types of tartan deviate from

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3588-401: The most available natural dyes . The Dress Act of 1746 attempted to bring the warrior clans there under government control by banning Highland dress for all civilian men and boys in the Highlands, as it was then an important element of Gaelic Scottish culture . When the law was repealed in 1782, tartan was no longer ordinary dress for most Highlanders. It was adopted more widely as

3657-449: The next pivot, and will carry on in this manner horizontally. In diagram B, the sett proceeds in the same way as in the warp but vertically. The diagrams illustrate the construction of a typical symmetric (also symmetrical , reflective , reversing , or mirroring ) tartan. However, on a rare asymmetric ( asymmetrical , or non-reversing ) tartan, the sett does not reverse at the pivots, it just repeats at them. An old term for

3726-508: The other nearly blended into green). The practice is more common in very recent commercial tartans that have no association with Scottish families or districts, such as the Loverboy fashion label tartan (2018, three blues, one an over-check). The idea that the various colours used in tartan have a specific meaning is purely a modern one, notwithstanding a legend that red tartans were "battle tartans", designed so they would not show blood. It

3795-404: The particulars of this definition  – see below ): The unit of tartan pattern, the sett , is a square, composed of a number of rectangles, square and oblong, arranged symmetrically around a central square. Each of these elements occurs four times, at intervals of ninety degrees, and each is rotated ninety degrees in relation to its fellows. The proportions of the elements are determined by

3864-791: The reason for the historical tartan differentiation by area) that they proved to have little mass-production potential, despite some purple dye ( cudbear ) commercialisation efforts in Glasgow in the 18th century. The hard-wound, fine wool used in tartan weaving was rather resistant to natural dyes, and some dye baths required days or even weeks. The dyeing also required mordants to fix the colours permanently, usually metallic salts like alum ; there are records from 1491 of alum being imported to Leith , though not necessarily all for tartan production in particular. Some colours of dye were usually imported, especially red cochineal and to some extent blue indigo (both expensive and used to deepen native dyes), from

3933-450: The relative widths of the stripes that form them. The sequence of thread colours in the sett (the minimal design of the tartan, to be duplicated  – "the DNA of a tartan"), starts at an edge and either reverses or (rarely) repeats on what are called pivot points or pivots . In diagram A, the sett begins at the first pivot, reverses at the second pivot, continues, then reverses again at

4002-747: The same tartan. Such varying of the hues to taste dates to at least the 1788 pattern book of manufacturer William Wilson & Son of Bannockburn. Today, the semi-standardised colour schemes or palettes (what marketers might call " colourways ") are divided generally into modern , ancient , muted , and weathered (sometimes with other names, depending on weaver). These terms only refer to relative dye "colourfulness" saturation levels and do not represent distinct tartans. Some particular tartan mills have introduced other colour schemes that are unique to that weaver and only available in certain tartans. Two examples are Lochcarron's antique , between modern and ancient ; and D. C. Dalgliesh's reproduction ,

4071-435: The sett and the more colours used, the more diffuse and 'blurred' the pattern". That does not necessarily translate into subtlety; a tartan of many colours and stripes can seem "busy". Scarlett (2008), after extensive research into historical Highland patterns (which were dominated by rich red and medium green in about equal weight with dark blue as a blending accent – not accounting for common black lines), suggested that for

4140-458: The sett or decorated in mid-selvedge with two thin strips; these were typically used for the bottoms of belted plaids and kilts, and were usually black in military tartans, but could be more colourful in civilian ones. The more elaborate selvedge patterns were a wider series of narrow stripes using some or all of the colours of the sett; these were almost exclusively used on household tartans (blankets, curtains, etc.), and on two opposing sides of

4209-489: The size and colour sequence of warp and weft remain the same. In more detail, traditional tartan cloth is a tight, staggered 2/2 twill weave of worsted wool: the horizontal weft (also woof or fill ) is woven in a simple arrangement of two-over-two-under the fixed, vertical warp , advancing one thread at each pass. As each thread in the weft crosses threads in the warp, the staggering by one means that each warp thread will also cross two weft threads. The result, when

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4278-458: The symbolic national dress of all Scotland when King George IV wore a tartan kilt in his 1822 visit to Scotland ; it was promoted further by Queen Victoria . This marked an era of rather politicised "tartanry" and "Highlandism" . While the first uniform tartan is believed to date to 1713 (with some evidence of militia use earlier), it was not until around the early 19th century that patterns were created for specific Scottish clans; most of

4347-401: The tartan databases (there may be preserved museum pieces with such patterns). Some tartan patterns are more abstract and do not fit into any of these styles, especially in madras cloth (see § Indian madras , below) . There are no codified rules or principles of tartan design, but a few writers have offered some considered opinions. Banks & de La Chapelle (2007) summarized, with

4416-527: The texture of the material to be woven. A thirty-Porter (which contains 20 splits of the reed) or 600-reed, is divided into 600 openings in the breadth of 37 inches. Twenty of these openings are called a Porter and into each opening are put two threads, making 1,200 threads of warp and as many of weft in a square yard of tartan through a 30-Porter reed. Splits are also referred to as dents , and Porters are also called gangs . Traditional tartan patterns can be divided into several style classes. The most basic

4485-705: The traditional ones were established between 1815 and 1850. The Victorian-era invention of artificial dyes meant that a multitude of patterns could be produced cheaply; mass-produced tartan fashion cloth was applied to a nostalgic (and increasingly aristocratic, and profitable) view of Scottish history. Today tartan is no longer limited to textiles , but is also used as a name for the pattern itself, regardless of medium. The use of tartan has spread outside Scotland, especially to countries that have been influenced by Scottish culture . However, tartan-styled patterns have existed for centuries in some other cultures, such as Japan, where complex kōshi fabrics date to at least

4554-439: The weaver William Wilson & Son of Bannockburn sometimes wove bright over-checks in silk, to give some added shine (commercially around 1820–30, but in regimental officers' plaids back to at least 1794). Tartan used for plaids (not the belted plaid) often have a purled fringe. An old-time practice, to the 18th century, was to add an accent on plaids or sometimes kilts in the form of a selvedge in herringbone weave at

4623-410: The weaving of suurrätt shawls/plaids . Tartan is usually woven balanced-warp (or just balanced ), repeating evenly from a pivot point at the centre outwards and with a complete sett finishing at the outer selvedge; e.g. a piece of tartan for a plaid might be 24 setts long and 4 wide. An offset , off-set , or unbalanced weave is one in which the pattern finishes at the edge in the middle of

4692-536: Was described as "plain coloured ... without pattern". Patterned cloth from the Gaelic -speaking Scottish Highlands was called breacan , meaning 'many colours'. Over time, the meanings of tartan and breacan were combined to describe a certain type of pattern on a certain type of cloth. The pattern of a particular tartan is called its sett . The sett is made up of a series of lines at specific widths which cross at right angles and blend into each other;

4761-425: Was originally the product of rural weavers of the pre-industrial age, and can be produced by a dedicated hobbyist with a strong, stable hand loom . Since around 1808, the traditional size of the warp reed for tartan is 37 inches (94 cm), the length of the Scottish ell (previous sizes were sometimes 34 and 40 inches). Telfer Dunbar (1979) describes the setup thus: The reed varies in thickness according to

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