Woven at Home
Woven at Home
The loom is pedalled like a bicycle, in the weaver's own house, on an island in the North Atlantic.
Hand woven is a phrase that gets used loosely almost everywhere. There is exactly one cloth where it is defined in law, and where breaking the definition is not a matter of taste but of statute.
Three Rules
The Harris Tweed Act of 1993 sets the definition, and it has three legs that all have to hold at once.
The wool must be pure virgin wool, dyed and spun in the Outer Hebrides, the island chain off the northwest of Scotland that includes Lewis, Harris, the Uists, Benbecula and Barra.
The cloth must be woven at the weaver's own home. Not at a mill. At their house.
And the loom must be powered by the weaver, pedalled like a bicycle. No motor drives the shuttle.
Break any one of those and the cloth legally cannot be called Harris Tweed, no matter how good it is.
The Looms
Independent weavers usually work a single width Hattersley loom, a machine introduced to the islands in the 1920s. It let weavers produce more and handle patterns that the big old wooden looms could not manage.
Mill weavers more often run a double width Bonas-Griffith rapier loom, introduced in 1996 to meet demand for a wider, softer, lighter cloth.
Either way the weaver ties in the warp by threading every end of yarn through the eyelets of the heddles in a specific order before they can start. Then they weave, and they fix every break and every mistake themselves as it happens.
The Orb
The certification mark is a small globe topped with a cross. It was granted in 1909, registered in 1910, and stamping began in 1911, which makes it the oldest British certification mark of its kind.
Every fifty meters of cloth is inspected by the Harris Tweed Authority and then stamped, by hand, with the Orb. That stamp is the only thing in the world of cloth that means precisely what it says.
Why It Feels Different
A person is at the pedals. The rhythm changes across a day. That variation lives in the cloth as a slight movement in the weave, and it is the reason a Harris Tweed looks alive next to a mill woven tweed of the same pattern.
It is also why the industry has never been able to scale past what its weavers can physically make, and why every length has its own character.
Ours
Each year three new Harris Tweeds are woven by hand for Black Bear Brand in Scotland, and three jackets are made from them.
The linings are our own Black Bear Brand diamond quilting, made in Japan.
There is a full post on the journal about how this cloth ended up with its own Act of Parliament, which is a genuinely good story.
A Way Of Life.
Shop the Story
the Harris Tweed Psychedelic BLUE Tartan Western Jacket
Related Reading
Harris Tweed: The Only Cloth Protected by an Act of Parliament