The end of traditional tartan - a personal view

[figheadair]

I'd love to hear a description of this process as well, as I had never heard before now that there was "glue" involved.

For posterity's sake, though, it's pretty easy to identify a tuck selvedge. You can see where the raw yarn ends are woven or 'tucked' back through the edge of the cloth, and appear as a fuzzy line about 1/2" or so from the edge. The twill pattern in this area is also more dense, because there are more threads than usual being crammed into this area. See the photo below (this is Lochcarron cloth on one of my kilts). Notice the fuzziness of the yarn ends just below the bottom black stripe.

The feel of the cloth is different in this area, too. It feels flatter and tighter. I would imagine that this is due mostly to the fact that the thread count is more dense here, but if there really is glue involved, that would also explain it. I'm curious what they use for this. It's definitely not a kind of glue that you can see or feel. Maybe something more like a starch?

The term 'glued' is mine and there may be some other method of securing the fold but I'm not sure starch and pressing would suffice. Quite how it's secured is somewhat secondary. I don't care what the trade propaganda says. it's not a selvedge and the finish is inferio in look and feel.

One of the things that this technique removes is the ability (for aesthetic reasons) to finish the edge in the middle of a large block of colour. Take a look at any tuck hem (it's not a selvedge ) and you'll see that it always finishes hard against a line of a difference colour so as to hide, as much as possible, the difference in the quality of the cloth at that point. The heavier the cloth the worse the effect.