I love wedding kilts!
My most recent kilt make was for a groom heading off to Scotland for their wedding (I miss Scotland!!). I made them a heavyweight kilt in Ancient Cameron from Locharron. It’s the first kilt I’ve made with the bespoke straps hand-dyed by my colleague Aurora (Handmade Revolution), a lovely medium brown, with an elegant embossed line around the edge.
Front view of the finished kilt
detail view of all the nice customisation, including the hand-dyed straps and the Century Prints lining by Guicy Guice.
Each kilt is painstakingly constructed by hand to specific measurements— in that sense, it’s the original bespoke tailored item!
The happy couple were awesome and shared this photo with me—it looks great in action!
I’m really chuffed that they sent me a photo of the kilt in action! I really love it when people share their photos of their garment or jewellery in the wild. I still get a thrill when I see someone wearing and enjoying my work!
Wandering around Harris and Lewis, or how I met a lot of tweed weavers
I lived in Scotland for a number of years. One of the joys was seeing a fair amount of the country. One of the last trips I took before I moved back to Toronto was with a good friend to the islands in the Outer Hebrides- Harris and Lewis (which, actually is just one island), of Harris Tweed fame.
I had so much fun-the island is a beautiful place with some amazing beaches, and cool lanscape (one of my hobbies is photography, and i LOVE landscapes!). There are lots of standing stones and ruins, and the people are really friendly. At that point, I’d already started doing kiltmaking, and I was interested in the whole industry of tweed weaving.
The island is remote, and there is not a huge amount of scope for employment, so the residents have a limited number of employment options. Alot of them work as independent weavers. It’s really cool, some work for the Tweed factory, but alot of them work for themselves. We visited numerous weaving sheds, as they are fairly well signposted as you drive round the island. Sadly, I wasn’t bold enough to ask to take photos, so I didn’t, but I met alot of the weavers, and they were kind enough to talk to me about some of their processes.
They start with a spool rack and set up the warp for the tweed, which is then transferred to the loom. Most people have these (relatively) old style looms, which actually run on cycle power, if you can believe it! So, you get your exercise as you weave. They have a punch card type system of keys which the weaver sets up for the pattern of the weft, and a-cycling they go! I can’t remember how much I was told they can weave in a day, but it was pretty impressive!
some tweed samples I picked up on Harris, as well as the iconic labels that you get with them!
When the tweed is woven, the job isn’t done yet. The cloth has to be finished, which most everyone sends to the factory on the island to be done. This process shrinks the tweed and tightens the weave, as well as giving the wool a nice finish. Once this is done, it’s ready to be used! I’ve been saving my tweeds, but I’m getting closer to using them.!