Quote Originally Posted by Barb T.
To be honest, I've been disappointed with Fraser and Kirkbright's tartan. Yes, it's less expensive than Scottish tartan, but, to my mind, it has lots of problems. I'm in the middle of making kilts from the XMarks tartan that they wove, and the selvedge isn't perfect enough for kilting (at least in my opinion - the turned threads at the selvedge bleeds the color and makes half of the white stripe a muddy blue in the XMarks tartan). I've used other tartans from their mill that also don't have kilting selvedges. Having said that, thought, this isn't an enormous problem, because you could easily put a hem in the kilt.

Far more serious is the fact that the XMarks tartan is woven in double width and the two halves _do not match_ in the size of the sett. In fact, from the selvedge to the center, one half is almost 3/8" bigger than the other, so you have to fudge the join. I made a kilt years ago from tartan woven by Fraser and Kirkbright's predecessor, and the tartan had the same problem, and I was hoping that the new owners would fix the problem, but this evidently hasn't happened.

And the XMarks tartan is supposed to be 14 oz, but it doesn't have the substantial feel of 14 oz Lochcarron or House of Edgar tartan, and there are visible spaces between the threads. It's almost as if the thread isn't quite heavy enough for the number of threads per inch chosen for the weave.
I didn't want to say anything, but since you said it, I'll second those sentiments. The selvedge is poor and the sett size was a bit off when I joined the 2 halves together.

Also, I've found that the wool is very "stretchy". When lining up the horizontal lines across the pleats, I have to tug on the material and misalign it so that when it gets hit by the needle it matches up.