The Making of Harris Tweed

[Nick Fiddes]

You put it so much better than me, Matt. :-)

[wildrover]

Hmmmm - Haggis has a bad enough reputation around the world without this gumming up the works.

Haggas...Haggis...uh oh. We're totally screwed now.

A very good piece. One bit of the story I've long disagreed with is the statement on the label that Harris Tweed is 'handwoven' - it is not. You are correct to say that it's produced entirely by human effort but the Hattersley and subsequent looms are not handlooms. The Harris Tweed Association continue to insist that the material is handwoven which is rather disingenuous.

Well, if you want to be picky, a spinning wheel is a piece of machinery too, so if we were to all blindly follow the fundamentalist ideal of "handmade", we'd quickly find ourselves below apes on the industrial scale...at least they use tools .

I'm quite willing to call it "handmade"...a great deal of literally by-hand care goes in to its manufacturer. A machined part, cut to 5/10,000 on a non-CNC mill, is also "handmade"...the machine did the cutting, but no blind eye was turned to the part's making .

I want one of these jackets, not one of the Four Almighty Chinese Made Clones, thankyouverymuch. I picked up a really nice sport coat the other day (we wear them with jeans and slacks here in the US, dunno if that's common there?), excellent cut, classic style, and could see having a couple more of similar cut and style in Harris Tweed. What do you have to do, to get a jacket like that, made from material like this?

Oh yeah, and there was a recurring theme about needing younger wearers, younger weavers, and so forth. Where can I get some snowboarding pants made from this stuff? No, I'm not crazy. I got a visual on it right now. Brownish-green tweed, throw some MacLaren Modern tartan on the pocket flaps and place them similar to how Analog did a few styles a couple years ago (pockets everywhere...they look like tactical/parachute pants, there's a pocket for everything), throw either a printed or embroidered Harris Tweed stamp on the back of the right leg, maybe a few more graphics, a place to attach a wallet/radio/whatever chain, add some vents, call it good. I'd shred it, definitely. Bond it to the liner the same way they do with denim snowboarding pants.

[Lallans]

At one point, I noticed Nike was making shoes with HT tops. Not sure what happened there.

[wildrover]

At one point, I noticed Nike was making shoes with HT tops. Not sure what happened there.

Now a collector's item. It was HT, found mention of it in one of the articles when I was searching around to figure out what you guys were talking about regarding this Haggas character.

Now, how about those snowboarding pants?