Where to get the weaving done in 2025?

[jsrnephdoc]

Industry scuttlebutt has it that at least two of the major tartan weavers (D.C. Dalgliesh, and I'm not sure what the other was, maybe Lochcarron) were really messed up by the pandemic

In midsummer 2023, (ALMOST post Covid), my sister, son, and I spent a good part of a day touring Lochcarron's mill, warehouse, and gift shop. We saw many happy employees, including a portly matron happily replacing a single repeating transverse error in a VERY long piece of newly woven cloth armed only with a special needle that could remove one thread and insert another..

Actually, it wasn't QUITE post-Covid, because our return to the US saw us snake along in a back-and-forth line among hundreds of other returnees and immigrants, many of them coughing and unmasked, in a cavernous basement room at ORD, all queueing up for a small number of immigrations and customs agent kiosks (all of us envying the occasional person who would stroll up to a automated kiosk, flash his passport at a scanner and his face towards a camera and be on his way within a second or two). Two consequences:

1. We all applied for Global Entry and won't ever travel internationally again without it
2. We all got symptomatic Covid

Here's a picture of that same smiling matron, taking a break from her work at the same station. She has an excuse (the guy shaking hands on the right). But, while we saw her work, she gave us the same smile and an informative lecture on her work.

And, of course, they DID weave some tartan just for him…


That tour was one of the best parts of our two weeks in the country.