Sources for wool kilt hose, traditional colors?

[Tobus]

They have them here, but I'm afraid they're a bit more than I'd be willing to spend on hose, beautiful as they are!

https://tartansocks.simdif.com/range-of-hose.html

I'm curious to see if The Wizard makes them as well!

Cheers,

SM

Yikes. Normally I would bite my tongue and move on, but for the high price they're asking for their "Gairloch" hose (I put those in quotes because they are not made anything like the originals), potential customers should know what they're getting ...or not getting, as it were.

It's not my intention to impugn anyone's product or quality, but there are just my observations from what I see in their photo.

First, these are built more like tube socks with little to no heel shape. They will not fit the same as a sock with a turned or shaped heel.

Second, I can tell that these were knitted as flat pieces and sewn up. You can see a seam running up the back of the leg, as well as on either side of the foot and on top of the toe. This is markedly different than a sock knitted in the round and shaped via knitting adjustments.

Third, it looks like these are knitted with just one yarn of a somewhat marled/variegated colour (notice the random colour variations in the foot). Then the diagonal stripes are stitched over the top of the base knit as "duplicate stitches". You can tell by some of the puckering that's going on with the diagonal stripes and the fact that the true red and green colours don't carry through any other part of the sock. Basically, they're selling a plain sock with the decoration tacked on rather than a sock that's made with the pattern integral to the knitting.

Fourth, it looks like the cuffs are secondary pieces that are stitched on at the end, rather than a foldover extension of the sock. This is somewhat common in commercial hose of all levels of quality, but it's not really how the traditional Gairloch hose were made.

These may be wearable and look OK from a distance, I guess. But they are pretty far removed from the traditional Gairloch hose as described by the Gairloch Museum. Traditionally, they are knitted with two colours of yarn all the way through as "stranded colourwork", with those yarns alternating in the background fields behind the diamond pattern, and coming to the forefront in the diamonds. The visual difference is very noticeable. The museum has a pattern that they sell for it (it's on my list of things to knit, and others here have completed many projects from this pattern). Traditionally they are knitted in the round, not as flat objects stitched together at the end. It may be that machine knitting just can't handle the stranded colourwork and pattern this requires (or they don't have the equipment to do it), so they're making a faux Gairloch pattern with some tricks to get roughly the same effect.

For £240, I would sure want something of a higher quality and more traditional-looking than the facsimile they're selling on that site. They're saying it was "replicated" from the mid-19th century pattern, but to me it looks like a very crude attempt to get the same effect.