Tartan for Kids
Tartan is famous world-wide and people in many countries are proud to wear it when they know their forefathers came from Scotland. It has been made in the Scottish Highlands for a very long time and is easily recognised with its brightly coloured stripes and bands. Today there are about 4,500 different tartans.
Early tartans were made by weaving the black, white or brown wools of sheep and the oldest piece of tartan found in Scotland was buried in the ground near Falkirk. It was stuffed into the neck of a pottery jar filled with silver Roman coins and was probably made from the undyed wool of the Soay sheep. The Soay is a very ancient breed of sheep which has brown or biscuit-coloured wool.
The breed has been in existance since at least the Stone Age and survived on St Kilda a tiny group of islands in the Atlantic Ocean. The breed has become very popular and you will see many small flocks now around Scotland
The earliest tartans ever found are over 3,000 years old. They were discovered on mummies in a desert in China and in some salt mines in Austria. Those salt mines were owned by the Celts who were the most prominent of our ancestors. When the Celts came to Scotland, they brought the idea of tartan with them and over 2,000 years later the Scottish clans and Regiments began to use them as part of their clothing.
In the bad times, many Scots left to travel and settle in foreign countries and they took their tartans with them. Today in America there are about 500 tartans - many of them new ones and almost all the American states have their own tartans to celebrate their early Scottish roots. Some unusual modern ones are for the FBI, the California Highway Patrol, New York City and many more.
Canada too has about 500 tartans and each province has its own. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police - the Mounties - have one and so does the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Making tartan cloth. There are six main stages to making tartan, whether it's nowadays or in olden times.
1. Gathering the wool.
2. Preparing the fibres for spinning.
3. Spinning the wool into yarn (or thread).
4. Dyeing the wool.
5. Weaving the thread into cloth.
6. Finishing the cloth.
First of all we'll look at the old-fashioned way which was used in crofts across Scotland for many hundreds of years.
Gathering the wool
Before about 1700, most sheep in Scotland were of the 'Highland' breed which are now extinct. Those sheep produced wool which was naturally shed - a bit like a dog or a cat's coat. It had to be gathered or pulled out, instead of shearing the sheep with special scissors or, as happens nowadays, with electric clippers.
Like the Falkirk tartan, early tartans were in black, brown and white because those were the natural colours of sheep's wool. A black and white tartan, where the squares are all the same size, is known as the 'Shepherd's Plaid' because that was one used by shepherds to keep warm and to wrap round new-born lambs that had lost their mother.
Wool from the Highland sheep produced a very rough cloth and in modern times a much softer wool is used which mostly comes from Australia.
Preparing the Wool for Spinning
The weaver could choose to weave a 'soft' or a 'hard' cloth because there was a short, fine wool that could be plucked form the sheep's chest area. That formed a yarn (thread) which was rather loose, with lots of air spaces and that would make the cloth softer to touch.
The wool is prepared for spinning by using carders. These have hundreds of small hooks and the wool is combed from one carder to the other - a bit like brushing your hair to get the tangles out. This was done until a fluffy roll was made.
The longer, rough wool yaken from the sides of the sheep would be soun into what was called a worsted yarn which make a 'hard' cloth. That wool was combed with a spiked comb, which made the long fibres run in the same direction.
Spinning the Wool
Drop spindle.
This is one of the oldest known tools for spinning wool and it looked and turned & bit like & spinning top. It was a very slow process. An end of wool would be attached to the spindle which was spun with the fingers, and dropped. This pulled a yarn from the loose bundle of wool. The bundle was often fastened to a stick called a 'distaff' and that would be tucked into a belt or under the arm. The spun yarn was then wound around the bottom of the spindle.
Having so little to carry. the spinner could also do other chores, like tending the animals, at the same tine.
Spinning Wheels
Muckle Wheel
The spinning wheel was introduced to the Highlands in about 1700 and it spun . wool much faster than the distaff and spindle.
An early type shown on the left was called the 'Muckle Wheel'. ('Muckle' means big or great). The very large wheel was given a spin by hand and the leather belt around it turned the spindle, to which the wool was attached. The spinner would step backwards and pull the yarn from the carded fleece, until the wheel stopped." Then she would step back and turn the wheel the other way, to wind it on to the spindle.
Saxony Wheel
A later type was the Saxony Wheel (right) which allowed the spinner to sit down. This smaller wheel was kept in motion by a foot pedal. It also had a removable bobbin. This type is still used today.
Dyeing the Wool
In the earliest times, tartan was made in only the natural colours of sheeps' wool - black, white, or brown but when coloured dyes were discovered, much more interesting cloth could be made.
Colours were extracted from leaves, berries, tree bark and other plants by boiling them in water for a long time. The wool had to be washed before it could be dyed, so that the natural oils in the wool of the wool were removed. Then the coloured water could be absorbed by the wool. Once the colour was dark enough, a 'mordant' was added to make the dye permanent. A mordant is a chemical which stops the dye running out again when the cloth is washed. Without it, a pair of red hose would have to be dyed again after every wash!
The salts of alum. copper, iron and chrome were used to fix the colour and stop it running.
Lichens could also be used to make dyes in many colours. Lichens are a grey fungus that grows on trees and rocks and all sorts of other substances in damp conditions. For a red dye, the tubs or dye baths would be filled with clean wet wool, lichen and stale urine. The bath would be kept warm for a month or longer if a darker colour was wanted.
Natural dyes weren't the only dyes that could be used because for many hundreds of years, trade with other countries included importing precious dyes such as indigo which was blue and cochineal which is a red dye made from the dried, dead bodies of insects. The insects are called Dactylopius Coccus and they're parasites that live on certain cactus plants. Four centuries ago, the Mexican Indians were seen using little brushes to gather the insects from their prickly host plants. Today, people have replanted the special cacti in many hot parts of the world such as South Africa, the Far East and Australia all of whom now produce cochineal. It takes a lot of these beetles to produce enough colour ... about 150,000 of them are needed to make 1 kilogram of red dye.
The dye business changed a great deal with the discovery of dyes which could be made cheaply from oil. The first of these was the violet dye, aniline, discovered by H.H. Perkins and during the next thirty years, the big chemical companies found many more dyes, and, by mixing chemicals, they produced an even wider range of colours which were much brighter than the old plant dyes.
Today, you can buy tartans in a choice of colours.
a) modern bright colours from aniline dyes.
b) lighter shades of those colours which look like the old plant dyes.
c) muted dyes which are a softer version of the ancient dyes
d) faded dyes which look as though the plant dyes have faded as they would if the tartan was left hanging on a washing .one for a year!
e) one weaver has even claimed to have copied the colours of tartan cloth that has been left in a peat bog for 100 years!
Weaving the Cloth
All woven cloth is made up of threads running in two directions. The ones that run the complete length of the cloth are called the warp. The ones that run across the width of the cloth are called the weft.
On a loom, the warp (the long threads shown in red here) are arranged in the pattern of the tartan and rolled onto a warp beam. If the piece of cloth is to be 30 metres long, then all those threads will be 30 metres long and the loose ends will be stretched out on the loom and fixed at the end where the weaver sits.
The 'across threads' - the weft (shown here in green) are woven in and out of the warp threads- a bit like darning. Each colour has its own shuttle that the weaver throws across on a wooden channel from one side to the other. The weaver has to be careful that he keeps track of which colours are shot across and when, so that the weft pattern matches the warp. The yarn (threads) used in the weft are carried across in what we call shuttles - one shuttle for each different colour.
The patterns of tartans are remembered by what's called their thread counts. For example the Rob Roy tartan shown here is a simple red and black and its pattern is written down as Red 125 threads Black 125 threads Red 125 threads Black 125 threads and that is repeated all the way across the width and the length of the material.
The upright looms were soon replaced in Europe by 'horizontal' looms from the 19th century. and eventually, the making of tartans became a cottage industry - as in the villages of Kilbarchan, near Glasgow, and Comrie in Perthshire. Tartan was made on hand-looms in many of the cottages and was sold to customers all over the country. However, the cottage weaving business soon became less important during the mid-nineteenth century, with the beginning of power-looms. These were used by firms like Wilson's of Bannockburn, who were one of the main tartan makers of this century.