Musings on the West Virginia tartan

[OC Richard]

I fly back to my home state tomorrow and it got me thinking...

There at the Bridgeport Highland Games every year there's a booth which promotes the officially adopted WV tartan. I'll see it Saturday, I suppose.

I just don't care for it very much. They took the design of a shawl, c1820, in the DAR collection in Barboursville, but modified it. The modified design has an added asymmetric element which jars my eye. And, overall, it has a weaker structure than the original shawl had.

Here's an image which (supposedly) reflects the original shawl design.



First I tried to come up with an approximate thread count using the Gaelic Themes tartan generator. (Since first posting this I've found the STA thread count, which I give at bottom.)
The trouble with that is the very limited palette. What's funny is the domino effect where a certain colour you want isn't there, so you're forced to choose something a bit different, which doesn't look good with the others so you change them in sequence!

However I somehow ended up with something I like, very different colours from the original but having a nice vintage look to it. One thing I really like, which isn't present in the original, is the clear distinction between the green and azure stripes:



(Maybe I could call it "West Virginia Ancient".)

Then I tried the ScotWeb generator, first with custom colours I created from the limitless palette. I really like that feature. I was able to get fairly close to one thing I really like about the original, which is the use of a deep Burgundy and a seafoam green. The Royal blue here is too light but I couldn't figure out how to change one colour without dumping the whole palette and starting over from scratch.



Then I tried one using the palette of available yarns and I really like the result:



What say you, O Tartanistas? I'm seriously thinking about having enough of this woven for a kilt.

The count given by the STA for West Virginia Old Shawl is
y4 g4 b8 r8 g8 r48 az8 g4 r8 g4 y4

and here is that count rendered in colours as close as I can obtain