HOE's inconsistent naming, Drummond of Perth

[OC Richard]

I used to work at a Highland Outfitter back in the 1980s. We carried tartan, neckties, and jackets from House Of Edgar. I'm very familiar with their tartan sample-books, of which we maintained a complete set, kept up to date.

HOE had/has a very interesting colour-scheme they call their Muted Range. I don't know anything about who came up with it, or when, but it's distinctive and lovely. I don't know of any other mills using that scheme.

The basic colour-shifts for their Muted Range are:

red > claret
blue > a soft blue I might call "French blue"
green > olive (or at least more of an olive cast than their Modern or Ancient green)
yellow > butter (rather than the bright clear lemon yellow of their Modern colours)

Here are a few examples from the HOE site, their Mediumweight Range







and the subject of this thread:



(the red in the two examples above look fuchsia on my monitor now, but the actual fabric is a lovely claret.)

The odd thing is, in HOE's Heavyweight Clan Tartans sample-book, the Drummond of Perth in the same colours is called "Modern colours" for some unknown reason:



Yes I know the computer-generated colours look rather different between the 13oz and the 16oz here, but I'm very familiar with both cloths in the flesh, because I played for years in a band that wore this tartan, and we had a mix of the two weights in the band and the differences were subtle, and both were clearly in HOE's "Muted" colours, not "Modern". The image showing Murray Of Atholl is the closest to representing the actual colours, at least on my computer screen now.

Here is a mix of the 13oz "Muted" and 16oz "Modern" being worn (we had just won that Sword In The Log trophy... sort of like the Sword In The Stone, but not... )



Here's Drummond of Perth in actual Modern Colours for comparison (the red is a bright tartan red, the blue and green quite dark)

[figheadair]

Can't account for thedifference if indeed the two are esentially the same shades. I will check the samples we have in the STA office when I'm back from my India travels.

On a related subject, I've just had to return a length of their Perthshire single width (13oz) which was described as having a 'traditional selvedge'. It did, but only on one side, the other being a ragged rapier edge: fine for kilt making but useless for making a traditional narrow (laird's) plaid. HOE seemed somewhat surprised when I raised the issue of their terminology and the fact that it was misleading.