Reid (1939)
This is one variant — a specific cloth: this exact thread count and colourway, with its own provenance below. It is one weaving of the sett (the scale-free proportion — the same cloth at any scale or shade), whose colour order is pattern GRGWGY.
Sourced from register-of-tartans. It is a 6 stripe tartan.
Original link https://www.tartanregister.gov.uk/tartanDetails.aspx?ref=3492
2 attestations — the source records this cloth was collapsed from (oldest owns this page)
- 01/01/2003 — Reid (1939) (register-of-tartans, record)
A bolt of cloth bought in 1939 by an American visitor, Alma Barker Johnson, who was told by a 'government recommended' shop that it was the 'Family tartan for Reid' - she was researching her family lineage and connections with a Sir John Reid. She took the cloth back to the US and at least a dress and a kilt were made from it. An interesting mystery. It is unlikely that if a Reid tartan existed in 1939 that it immediately sank into oblivion with no record of it remaining, but would the enquirer's great aunt have bought a bolt of a fashion tartan unless it had some family significance? Thread count estimated from a photograph of the kilt. - pre 2003 — Reid (1939) (Artefact) (tartans-authority, record)
A bolt of cloth bought in 1939 by an American visitor Alma Barker Johnson who was told by a 'government recommended' shop that it was the 'Family tartan for Reid' - she was researching her family lineage and connections with a Sir John Reid. She took the cloth back to the US and at least a dress and a kilt were made from it. An interesting mystery. It's highly unlikely that if a Reid tartan existed in 1939 that it immediately sank into oblivion with no record of it remaining. Possibly the 'recommended shop' seized the opportunity to get rid of a slow selling fashion tartan on an unsuspecting visitor? Thread count estimated from a photograph of the kilt.
Dataset — provenance for this record, inherited from the source manifest
- source
- Scottish Register of Tartans
- data captured from
- https://github.com/thetartan/tartan-database/blob/master/data/register-of-tartans/data.csv
- data date
- 2003 (this record)
- licence
- Crown copyright
Capture chain — the hands this data passed through, oldest first; each capture carries its own licence
- Scottish Register of Tartans · Crown copyright
the living register — still published by National Records of Scotland - thetartan/tartan-database 2016-2017 · CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Levko Kravets's frozen compilation — the capture we vendored, and where its CC licence text came from - this dictionary captured 2026-06-10 · commit 5bf86c7566
each re-capture is a git commit to data/sources
Register references
External register numbers recorded for this tartan.
- Scottish Register of Tartans: 3492
- Scottish Tartans Authority (ITI): 5874
Thread count
Y/80 R16 Y8 W4 Y8 LY/10
One full sett is 162 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| W | #F7F7F7 #F7F7F7 | oklch(97.6% 0.000 89.9) |
| Y | #8C7038 #8C7038 | oklch(56.0% 0.082 83.0) |
| R | #D60020 #D60020 | oklch(55.2% 0.224 25.5) |
| LY | #E8C000 #E8C000 | oklch(81.9% 0.168 93.7) |
Sample pattern
Nearest tartan variants
The nearest existing variants by ΔTartan distance, with this cloth at the top so the swatches line up against it.
Neighbour map
Every grey dot is one of 13621 variants placed by the first two principal components of the ΔTartan feature space (42% of its variance). Red is this tartan; blue dots are its nearest — click one to open its page.
ID: /variants/s6/y40r8y4w2y4ly5x2y2203076-ly3307090/