Good evening all,

I've been toying with an idea for a while (and had mentioned it to McFarkus during our kilt night several weeks ago) and thought I'd present to the rabble for comment and for a bit of a reality check.

Currently, each of the four services has a (generally) universal tartan suitable for wear. My thought was to develop a series of tartans based on modern campaign medals issued by the United States government for military service during any of the wars from Korea on forward.

As an example: some of you know that I'm a Desert Shield/Desert Storm vet. The campaign medal awarded for service in that campaign looks like this:



Based on that image, I've constructed the following tartan over at the Tartan Designer:



(For the curious, the pattern was LT5RB2W2S2LT20MG3K4 with a mirrored sett).

There are several other campaign medals with which I'd like to do this: There are the campaign badges from Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, as well as a design for the National Defense Service Medal (for the curious, the main page for these awards can be found here).

I really like the idea of doing this, and I think the cause is worthy, but the more I think about it, the uglier the details seem to get. My entire purpose would be to generate and copyright the pattern, but I specifically do NOT want to own the copyrights or the registration. They were paid for by the men and women that earned the badges, but I'd have no idea to whom the copyrights should be assigned. I've toyed with the idea of setting up a not for profit (my Father-in-law is a lawyer by trade, and could probably help with that, or there are other lawyers in residence here that I hope would be willing to assist).

This leads into a second area: cost. According to Matt's web page, I believe that registering a custom tartan and getting a 4 yard sample was on the close order of $700. I don't know what the breakdown on that is, but, if we look at doing this for $700 per medal, we're already looking at close to $5000 for the medals I've mentioned. As much as I wish I could afford it, there's no way I could afford to cough that up out of my own pocket.

So, I guess I'm just trying to throw out an idea and am looking for suggestions as to how to make it work. My end goal would be to have registered tartans for each of those medals, generally assigned to the public domain, with the understanding that they would NOT be universal, and that anyone wearing the tartan would have been expected to have been awarded the corresponding medal.

Does this sound like a good idea to anyone? Does it sound like I've hit the Glenlivet bottle too hard tonight? Any thoughts are welcome!

Thanks,

Brian