Greetings! Seeking into on tartan registry organisations, and tartan software

[SMcCandlish]

Checking in from Oakland, California. Wasn't born in Scotland, but lived for a time (via US military) in England as a child, and we went to Scotland pretty often.

Back in 1991, when I lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I designed a set of tartans for McCandlish/McCandless (among many other spellings), since the family didn't have one. I had some help in this from J. Charles "Scotty" Thompson, author of So You're Going to Wear the Kilt. These are registered with Scottish Tartans Authority (STA), and originally with the Scottish Tartan Society (STS) "Register of All Publicly Known Tartans", I think, though that may now be defunct; and also with the merged International Association for Tartan Studies / Tartan Educational and Cultural Association (IATS/TECA), as I recall, though it may also not be around any longer. The registrations were ported over to the new-ish Scottish Register of Tartans (SRT, TartanRegister.gov.uk), though with several errors. I just got them corrected yesterday. So, they are now showing up correctly at https://www.tartanregister.gov.uk/qR...ing=McCandlish. I have yet to try Scottish Tartans World Register, though I have sent them a message about their registration process. The tartans are a bit unusual in using two tones of the same color (e.g., a dark green and a light green, in the green version), for a rather subtle appearance. I think I only found two or three of the more historical tartans that did this, and even then the "duplicate" color was usually in a thin stripe, not a major part of the field as in the McCandlish tartans.

I have a kilt in the red version of the tartan, which I've been wearing since around 1996 (pic below). Unfortunately, the San Francisco Bay Area is bad for moths, and they eventually got to it despite my efforts to keep it sealed away. It's not totally ruined, but I definitely need a new one. I got mine made by Celtic Craft Centre in San Francisco (with tartan woven by D C Dalgliesh), but CCC closed their US branch and as far as I know are only in Scotland these days. I may go with Kathy Lare in Albuquerque, since I've seen her work in person (she was trained in Scotland, and does a really good job).

I've been wanting to check (and as necessary correct) every place that may have a record of these tartans on file, as twice already I have encountered incorrect versions "in the wild". In one case, a vendor at a Highland games event in California had a scarf that was allegedly in the green version, but only had a single green tone to it. I think both STA at one point, and SRT until very recently, had the thread count wrong, with a single green in it; both should be corrected now. Much later, I ran into a kilt mod for the video game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion which claimed to have the McCandlish red tartan (among many others, of course), but it was seriously wrong; the colors were correct, but the layout was not, and I think this may have been from repeating the half-sett without mirroring, as if it were the full sett. SRT's records now make it clear that the thread count is half-set and with a full count at the pivots.

Anyway, I'm wondering whether there are more places to check. The only organisations I'm aware of are SRT, STA, STS, IATS/TECA, and STWR. STWR doesn't have these tartans at all, and IATS/TECA and STS may not exist any longer. Wikipedia says STS is defunct. I'm told there's something called the TartanArt Database (which is apparently something you have to buy for a lot of money, and is only available to weavers and kilt shops), so I don't really know how to find and verify the information in it about these tartans.

PS: Is there any good tartan design/rendering software these days? Long ago, I used something called Tartan Viewer (for Windows XP, I think), and have also tried Textile32 (also dating to the same era). I was able to find the latter again, though its behavior in Windows 10 is a bit sketchy. Tartan Viewer I can't find again (yet), but I have images I made from it way back when, and they look really good (even photorealistic), so I would like to track it down. I've tried several online web-apps, and they have not produced very good output so far, though my investigations of them have not been exhaustive.