Martin Family Tartan
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 GGKGKGKBK.
Part of the Martin tartan — the named design grouping this sett with its other cloths.
Sourced from house-of-tartan. It is a 9 stripe tartan.
Original link http://www.house-of-tartan.scotland.net/house/TartanViewjs.asp?colr=Def&tnam=1207
Provenance
Earliest known date: 1977 In 1993 Kiltmaker & kilt historian Bob Martin explained that years ago when he first became interested in Scottish tartan (circa 1976) , he bought this J.P. Stevens (a weaver in Burlington North Carolina) fashion fabric from a local outlet in Greenville SC and made himself a kilt from it. He remembered the price being about $2/yd and he bought the last piece of 15yds. He wore the kilt to the Charleston Games and when Scotty Thompson asked him what it was, he replied "Martin" and SC immediately registered it with the Scottish Tartans Society and so it has remained to this day. The thread count is as given by Bob Martin -- he names the second colour as "purple" but says it is more like maroon or claret. However he suggests a more pleasing sett would have a narrower yellow stripe.
Dataset — provenance for this record, inherited from the source manifest
- source
- House of Tartan
- data captured from
- https://github.com/thetartan/tartan-database/blob/master/data/house-of-tartan/data.csv
- data date
- 1977 (this record)
- licence
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Capture chain — the hands this data passed through, oldest first; each capture carries its own licence
- House of Tartan
the weaver/retailer's database — the site is now offline; the URL is kept as the ultimate source's identity - 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
Thread count
Y/8 G16 K6 G6 K6 G6 K16 DR21 K/5
One full sett is 167 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| DR | #55120C #55120C | oklch(30.0% 0.099 29.3) |
| G | #008B2A #008B2A | oklch(55.4% 0.170 145.9) |
| K | #000000 #000000 | oklch(0.0% 0.000 0.0) |
| Y | #8B6E00 #8B6E00 | oklch(55.1% 0.113 90.4) |
Sample pattern
Compared to the master
This cloth is one sett of its design; the master sett (the exemplar the design is anchored on) is below for comparison.
Its ΔTartan distance from the master is 0.46 — the same measure the nearest-tartans table ranks by (0 is identical; a re-scale of the same cloth is near 0, a recolour or a different proportion further).
this sett
master sett ★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/s9/y8g16k6g6k6g6k16dr21k5/