Do any of the weathered tartans have official clan recognition?

[figheadair]

Remember, the over 11,500 current registered tartans are all unique by virtue of how they are woven. I'm taking thread counts. Not color. Tartan is not the color. Weaving patterns only say red, black, green etc. Some will specify dark or light colors.

Hummm. Not sure where this 11,500 figure comes from but it's considerably higher that the number of tartans recorded by either the Scottish Tartans Authority or the National Register of Tartans, both are somewhere in the 7000s. It is not correct to say that they are all unique by virtue of their threadcount: 42nd/Campbell/Sutherland/Munro Hunting/Grant Hunting are all the same sett. Similarly, Drummond and Grant, there are other too.

Tartan is absolutley about colour; i.e. generic colour terminology as opposed to shade or hue. For example, red is red but it can be scarlet, claret, ruby, crimson, pink and at it's simplest each shade can be light, medium or dark.

So "Ancient" simply means the mill is trying to replicate what they think the tartan would have looked like in the original organic dyes (resulting in lighter colors which many prefer because you can see the patterns better - admit it, those blocks of black, green, blue pretty much blend together)

And this is one of the major errors inthe understanding of natural dyes, the shades available from them and the way that they were traditionally combined in tartan.

Or "Weathered", they try and replicate what the thing would look like if left out in the sun or was washed with lye soap a hundred times. Other designations such as "muted" are simply nomenclature changes by different mills.

Not quite. The Weathered range was originally the response by Locharron et al to Dalgliesh's Reporduction rangewhich was copyright. Neither laying out in the sun or washing would result in the colour changes, yes I mean colour changes not shade or hue, that are found in the Reproduction or Weathered ranges.

Bottom line - if you like it wear it.

Absolutely!