Custom Tartan Weaver

[cavscout]

Seeing Arlen's thread about a rare or un-known tartan reminded me about this.

While my family and I were in the mountains this past weekend, we stopped at the FoxFire Folk Museum.

While there we were lucky enough to get to see a lady who does the weaving. She mentioned in her dialog that she does kilting fabric. My wife quickly cut her eyes at me as I gave a little wicked grin and the wheels started turning

She went on to go through basically the entire process from carding and dyeing the wool, spinning it into thread to weaving. Very interesting. She shared a formula for a "pre-treat solution" to help the fibers absorb more of the dye (I'll post it when I dig it out of the papers I collected from the trip). It contained Cream of tarter and alum and enabled her to get very rich colors out of dyes from plants which in my experience always come out very light. She had a yellow yarn she had used this on and it was as bright and rich as if it had come from a craft store. I was shocked when she said it had come from a plant.

A large group showed up toward the end and we had to move on to make room in the small building but I did get to ask about the tartan cloth she weaves.

$100 / yard, 5 yard minimum

She said she really only does it for people who can;t find a mill to weave a rare tartan or for people who need a swatch to send to the Scottish Tartans Authority for registration. She freely admitted that for the more common tartans, ie. Fraser, it's better to go to the big mills and get it from them. But how cool would it be to have a kilt in your family tartan Sheared, dyed, woven and sewn up by hand. Excuse me, I need to sit down on that one

I got her card just for reference. If anyone wants the info drop me PM but you may be able to get in touch with her through the FoxFire Museum also. Oh, here she is on their web site http://www.foxfire.org/prodweaver.html