Hand Woven Tartan Fabric

[Truitt]

...and the economics of weaving your own.

My hand-woven Scottish Wildcat tartan on the loom:





For anyone who is curious, the only reason to hand weave tartan fabric is some form of self-actualization. It might be for the enjoyment of weaving, or the challenge, or to create something a bit unique. In my case it might be all of the above. But, for now, it doesn’t make financial sense. That may change if we lose many more commercial weavers.

I took up weaving about a year ago, and I discovered that I really enjoyed it. I decided to weave a length of kilt fabric in the Scottish Wildcat tartan. I made a donation to Wildcat Haven, but I won’t count that against my expenses. Nor will I count the cost of the weaving equipment.

I only found two sources of good worsted wool yarn in the weight I wanted. Both had limited color pallets, but I managed to find colors I liked in the more expensive of the two yarns. So the yarn wound up costing me $499.50. And that isn’t even the real expense.

All that yarn came in skeins, which are impossible to work with. After about six hours of winding skeins into balls I had a usable form of yarn and could start the warping. Due to loom waste, shrinkage, added length for fabric samples, etc. I needed to make a 14-yard warp to comfortably weave a kilt-length of single-width fabric. And I needed the warp to be 32 inches wide to make sure I had at least 27 inches of finished fabric. It took about 14 hours to make a 14-yard by 32-inch warp and get it on the beam. So, 20 hours of labor at that point.

Next came threading the heddles. Threading 1280 heddles one at a time takes a while. From my sampling, the best-case scenario for threading all those heddles is 10 hours. I’ll pretend nothing went wrong and that it took me 10 hours. Sleying the reed (pulling the yarns through the reed) took another six hours. And it took a couple of hours to tie the warp to the front beam and get everything adjusted. So it took right around 40 hours to make the warp and dress the loom

Ready to start weaving:


Weaving by hand is not a particularly fast process. When everything was going well I could weave about two feet per hour. That isn’t bad. At 40 picks per inch that comes to about 16 picks per minute. Another way to look at it is that it took a bit less than four seconds every time I threw the shuttle and beat the weft in. Considering color changes and how hard I was beating, that was making good time. But things don’t always go well. Occasionally you make a bad throw of the shuttle and break a warp thread, or a bolt on the loom rattles loose and it takes a while to figure out why the tension went wacky. Those things take time to correct. And it takes time to wind bobbins for the shuttles. Overall I averaged a bit less than 18” of weaving per hour. I wove 12 yards of fabric, so it took a little over 25 hours to weave the fabric.

Woven fabric on the cloth storage beam:


To my surprise, the fabric did not shrink much warp-wise when I finished it. It did shrink a bit weft-wise, but the weft finished at only about 5% smaller in the sett than the warp. I came out with right at 12-yards of fabric after finishing…plenty for a kilt, some accessories, and some samples. That 12 yards cost right at $500 plus 65 hours of labor, and that is for single-width.

Finished sett size...I could stretch and block it to square, but maybe this is close enough?


I could have ordered four yards of double-width fabric and it would have cost less that the yarn alone cost for this project. Still, I wouldn’t trade this experience for the world. I will soon (hopefully) have a kilt that I wove and that I made. And it will be a bit unique. Besides being a slightly different color palette than the commercially woven Scottish Wildcat tartan, I used silk for the yellow and I used a broken twill at the selvedge. My selvedge isn’t as perfect as what some of the commercial weavers produce, but it turned out pretty nice for hand-woven fabric.

12 yards of fabric drying after a wet finish:


Selvedge...not bad for hand-woven, but I hope to do better: