How modern day tartan's are woven

[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.