I love 99pi so much, which is why this particular series is so frustrating to me. If you’d actually talked to people who know about textiles, it could have been great! People who specialize in Scottish tartans are all fine and well, but the fact that they snowed you with the bus-tour-guide, bush-league lie about plaid being a Scottish invention is astonishing to me.

If you had talked to a textile historian without a nationalistic axe to grind, or, say, an actual weaver, you would have learned that plaid is one of the oldest, most widespread designs in woven cloth. It is almost an inevitable part of weaving. Stripes are the first stage; if you know you don’t have enough of any one color of weft yarn to finish the warp on your loom, it’s natural to divide it up into more or less consistent repeats rather than one big block of color A and one big block of color B. Plaids are a hop skip and a jump away–they’re what happens when you also don’t have enough of any one warp yarn to make your whole warp one color. They can even be accidental–if you’re winding a warp from various small balls of yarn, you may well end up with a stripey warp, and then if you just sort of alternate random small balls of yarn when filling your shuttle with weft yarn, you’ll also create stripes in the weft, at which point…hey, look, plaid!

Obviously there are infinite refinements and variations to this process. One of the most fascinating things I’ve ever read was about a textile historian who was trying to recreate a prehistoric textile from a fragment that didn’t extend to an edge, so she didn’t know which threads were warp and which were weft. So she just picked one, to try to see what it would look like, and was confused by the fact that there was no reliable pattern to the number of ends (warp threads) in each color. Like, it would be 12 of one, 4 of another, then 11 of the first, 5 of the second, etc. Finally, she started counting the ends of what she’d surmised to be the weft, and found out they were exactly 12/4/12/4/etc (made up numbers because I can’t remember how to find the article). So basically, that was the warp, and then in the weft, they did it by eye until each horizontal stripe was the proper width to match the vertical ones. But you’d never know that except by trying it!

Anyway…long story short, I truly do love the show, I love your passion, I love your fascinating topics, this is just one where I happen to know enough to get myself in trouble!