Here's an announcement that should please anyone who loves tartan, so this seems the appropriate forum to first mention it to the world.

As you'll know, when tartans are recorded, they are usually given quite quite general colour shade defintions: e.g. 'dark green' or 'mid blue'.

And this is often quite different to how it's actually woven in practice, since most mills choose colours that work together, either as 'modern' or 'ancient' or 'reproduction' colours (the latter being a D.C. Dalgliesh innovation, that other mills copied under various names).

This works fine when you're ordering fabrics off the shelf, and you have either a physical swatch or at least a photograph of the tartan to go on.

It's not so great when you're considering getting a tartan woven to order, in your favourite colourway, when the best you can normally hope for would be a few sample yarn threads to get an idea of the shades that would go into your tartan.

Well, that problem exists no longer!

Welcome to the D.C. Dalgliesh Tartan Library...

We've gone back to first principles, and created a full index of recorded tartans, each of which is shown in each of the three main colourway variants - with beautiful high quality photorealistic images, which use the actual yarn shades that would be chosen for each colourway.

See http://www.dcdalgliesh.co.uk/tartan_found.rpy?id=437388 for example
and (once it's loaded!) hover over the main image to see it in all its detailed glory.

Then click on the Ancient or Reproduction variants below, to do the same for those.

So for example you'll find you'll find all the M tartan and an A-Z list here:
http://www.dcdalgliesh.co.uk/tartana...s.rpy?letter=M

There's still some tweaking to do. There are a few gaps to fill, including some recent tartans. And this has been largely generated based on intelligent algorithms we've written, but some need manual correction, so we'll be going through them individually over the next few months. And meanwhile this will always happen whenever an order is placed. But mostly we think the results are pretty good already.

We can also produce these instantly for any new tartan, or for special variants for anyone wanting their own yarn colour choices.

And this is only the start of a very sophisticated order specification and recording system we're developing for D.C. Dalgliesh, which will offer a cutting edge technological front onto the very traditional artisanal weaving processes, which we still intend to change not a whit.

But if anyone has any feedback or ideas, we'd be delighted to hear from you as always.

Hope you like!

Nick