Tartan Design Questions

[Todd Bradshaw]

A couple of other things....... Assuming that you have designed a tartan that you like, which the software says is a good sett size for kilting, and it looks good in the enlarged preview, you really won't be seeing an awful lot of it. The preview will probably only show you a bit more than one sett (maybe a woven piece that would only be 6"x6" or so). In many cases I've found that in order to really see what the tartan looks like, you need to see a lot more of it, with the pattern repeating several times.

What I do is take a screen capture of the preview, stick it in Photoshop and stitch a whole bunch of them together - yielding the image that a hunk of tartan that is a couple feet square would have. Without a photo program, I suppose they could even be printed, cut out, and taped together. Some of the designs that I liked on the designer looked quite different when you could see more repeats. Some seemed rather boring, others just didn't do what I thought they would do, and some I just no longer liked. The tartan designer is quite good, but there is no way I would invest in any new design without first getting some sort of look at a bigger piece of it.

For example: This was my design #15 as seen on the designer (I eventually drew more than 30 designs, so I just numbered them to keep track of them and we finally settled on pattern #6 for our tartan- hence the Bradshaw T6 tartans shown above).



This was the enlarged preview the designer gave me. So far, so good. It even looks like woven cloth.



But when I stitched a bunch of them together to get a better idea of what the expanded pattern would look like, I got this weird op-art effect that I didn't really like and hadn't anticipated when looking at the previews. It kind of brought up a mental image of folks behind me in the parade of tartans falling over because they got dizzy looking at my kilt. I don't think I would ever have noticed it without seeing the expanded preview - at least until the bolt arrived........