How modern day tartan's are woven

[Morsdon]

Interesting short video from the Science channel's "How do they do it?"

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGh66uDH6Ic


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[unixken]

Here's a corrected link...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGh66uDH6Ic

[MacEanruig]

I am always fascinated with this process. Thanks for sharing!

[Calgacus]

I believe that the OP's video shows a modern Rapier loom, which produces a tuck selvedge. It is instructive to compare the speed with which the tartan is woven by that loom to the following video, which shows a more traditional dobby loom with shuttle which produces a true woven selvedge.



I think this amply demonstrates why most tartans are (sadly) now woven with a tuck selvedge.

[tundramanq]

On a shuttle loom when the color changes, does the loom tie off the old color thread to the new color or is this handled after the weaving by hand. Techie gotta know

[Calgacus]

On a shuttle loom when the color changes, does the loom tie off the old color thread to the new color or is this handled after the weaving by hand. Techie gotta know

I can't say for all looms or all techniques, but for this particular piece of cloth the threads are left connected and continue from stripe to stripe whilst the cloth is still on the loom. Once it is woven, the interlinking threads are (presumably) cut off and finished by hand. Whether they are simply cut off, or are tucked at all I do not know.

You can see the interlinking threads between stripes in the following photo, specifically the red and green threads running along next to the selvedge. If you click on the photo you can get access to larger resolutions.

2014-10-03 11.49.08 by Richard the Rogue, on Flickr

[figheadair]

On a traditional loom, be it a hand-loom or Dobby-type, the threads are introduced on one side only. The colour bands in a traditional tartan are always multiples of 2 threads meaning that the shuttle starts and finishes on the same side resulting in the cloth having a clean and a float selvedge. The latter is the one where the threads are carried over.

When the cloth is finished the float selvedge is cleaned up by the big loops simply being cut flush with the selvedge. Small loops of 8-10 ends are normally left as they will be tight to the selvedge. There is no way that the cloth can unravel as a result of this cutting process. As a hand-weaver I do this manually but it's possible that there is an industrial method on commercial cloth. For single width cloth that is going to be used for kilting there is no need to remove any of the floats because the top x inches will be cut off to get the required 'drop' but it’s unlikely that one would find this on commercial cloth because it is all finished in bulk.

In traditional plaiding the clean selvedge was the one that would carry the herringbone finish or selvedge mark and the cloth would be joined at the float one.