The Color Goes In Before the Yarn

The Color Goes In Before the Yarn

A plain Harris Tweed is never actually one color.

Hold a piece of Harris Tweed up close and you will find colors in it that you did not see from across the room. A green has rust in it. A grey has blue and a little yellow. That is not a printing trick or a finish. It happens before the yarn exists.

Dyed in the wool, literally

Most cloth is made from yarn that gets dyed after it is spun, or from fabric dyed after it is woven. Harris Tweed is dyed at the fiber stage, while the wool is still loose. The phrase dyed in the wool is not a metaphor here. It is a description of the process.

Then it is blended to a recipe

Once dyed, the colored wools and the natural undyed wool are weighed out in exact proportions and blended together. It is done to a recipe, the same way a paint or a dye bath is, except the colors never fully merge. A pink might carry cream, orange and a whisper of green in it to give the pink depth. Each color stays itself inside the mix.

The blended wool is carded between toothed rollers that tease and mix the fibers, then spun into a single ply yarn with enough twist to survive a loom. Every thread coming off that process is already carrying several colors at once.

Why that matters when you are wearing it

Because the color has depth to it, the cloth moves with the light. A tweed jacket at dawn is a different color than the same jacket at four in the afternoon under a grey sky. Flat dyed cloth cannot do that. This is also why the tweeds look like the islands they come from, all that heather and lichen and sea.

The Harris Tweed Act protects this. The law requires that the wool be dyed and spun in the Outer Hebrides, and handwoven by the islanders at their homes, and finished there. Change the order of the process and it is no longer the cloth.

Ours

Each year three new Harris Tweeds are woven by hand in Scotland for Black Bear Brand and three jackets are made from them. The cloth comes to us and the jackets are made in Seattle, with diamond quilting made for us in Japan inside. Three new tweeds are being woven right now.

A Way Of Life.

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