As I was driving today, I was thinking about tartan options for my planned military box pleat project. I started thinking about how to get a really coarse and rustic cloth, and my mind led me to tweed woven in a tartan pattern. If you Google images on tartan tweed, you'll see some lovely variations of typical clan tartans.

And it got me to wondering. One of the loveliest characteristics of tweed is that it often uses yarns that are "flecked" or vary in colour along their length. Blue threads can vary from light to dark, or from greenish to bluish, for example. Greens may vary from dark green to light green to yellow, or even have other colour wool fibers spun together for an overall green look. When put together as woven cloth, you get an overall colour scheme that is rather uniform when seen from a distance, but up close it explodes with all the variation.

Why haven't the traditional tartan weavers incorporated this concept into a specialised range of tartan colours? We have modern colours, ancient colours, reproduction, muted, weathered, and many other schemes that add a twist to the way that standard setts are viewed. But they all use yarns that are very consistently dyed instead of having some variation or flecking along the strands. Why has no one introduced a colour range that includes yarns with varying colours like the tweeds have? Is it because this is one of the defining characteristics of tweed, and it's a line that cannot be crossed? Would weaving tartan with flecked yarn essentially make it just a twill tweed?

I would think it could be a very popular option, if marketed as a "rustic" colour range.