What tartan is this?

[Morris at Heathfield]

So, I decided to try my hand at designing a new tartan. Actually, I designed my first tartans some twenty years ago and got back into the tartan design business even before I joined this forum. But this is the first tartan I've formally announced. (Some of you may recall a different tartan I used as an avatar a couple years ago, but never really announced.)

As this tartan is more-or-less a "commissioned" tartan, and I've displayed it elsewhere, I thought I'd introduce it here as well:



I'm calling it the Aneutronic Fusion tartan. (For an introduction to aneutronic fusion, see here.) It's a fashion tartan for now, but I'm hoping it will be a commemorative tartan before very long.

In designing the tartan, I had a vague idea that I wanted to use the colors red, blue, green, and white. After numerous unsatisfactory iterations I decided to drop one color—blue—and then keep working at it until I got something I liked. I used the STA's Croft Weaver to finalize the proportions and thread count, and ensure the sett size was reasonable.

Next I worked on getting the right shades. I used the colors of the Crawford tartan from the Scottish Register of Tartans to start out with. Then I tried out various colors in Scotweb's Tartan Designer. But what I ended up doing was selecting colors from actual photographs of several D.C. Dalgliesh tartans using the GIMP's color picker. The crimson is from Matt Newsome's New House Highland tartan. The green I manipulated until I thought it looked right, but I used the MacDonald of Glencoe tartan as a reference. The white could be from numerous tartans but, just for the record, it came from the Currie tartan.

Apart from some help from Croft Weaver, the Tartan Designer (ultimately unused), and the GIMP, all of the tartan design was done using the mktartan command-line program.

The number and arrangement of stripes has absolutely no meaning that I've bothered to come up with yet. The colors had some meaning from the beginning of the design. The meaning of the crimson is the least settled. It could represent a number of the lighter elements used in aneutronic fusion reactions, such as hydrogen/deuterium, lithium, or helium-3, all of which tend to produce bluish, purplish, pinkish, or reddish plasmas. The green, however, has always represented boron. The white represents the energy released in a nuclear fusion reaction.

[Morris at Heathfield]

Bad form to reply to myself, I know, but since I recently modified the first post, I figured I ought to bump the thread as well.