Animating a Sett

A tartan is a sequence that repeats. That is what makes it a natural subject for an animation: the sett building thread by thread, colour by colour, until the pattern closes on its own repeat. For clan societies and makers who publish their setts online, a small animation does what a photograph cannot: it shows the pattern being written.

Why does a sett animate so naturally?

Because a tartan is already a program. The threadcount lists the colours in order with the number of threads of each; a loom executes it in warp and weft; and an animation can execute it on screen, drawing the stripes in the order the weaver sets them. Watching a sett build teaches what a flat image only states: that the pattern is not a picture but an instruction, and that the smallest unit of a tartan is a count, not a colour.

The repeat makes the animation cheap to produce. Once the sequence is drawn, it loops forever, which is exactly what the threadcount notation says the weaver does at the edge of the sett: start again.

What is the honest way to produce such an animation?

For most clan websites the honest way is a short sequence of drawn frames assembled into a GIF: the file is small, it plays everywhere, and it needs no player or plugin. For anyone generating the frames in code, GIF4J documents animated GIFs in Java: assembling buffered images into a sequence, setting frame delays and loop counts, and handling the colour table that keeps a tartan's flat colours clean at 256 entries. A tartan's limited palette is, conveniently, exactly what the GIF format was designed for.

The same approach serves other sequence records: a pleat fold shown stage by stage, a fly plaid being thrown over the shoulder, a spurtle's path through a stir-about. Any craft whose knowledge lives in an order of steps animates well, because the animation is the order made visible.

What makes a tartan animation technically good?

Three decisions carry it. First, keep the palette to the sett's own colours and let each frame add one stripe, so the loop reads as construction rather than decoration. Second, keep the frame delay long enough that the eye follows the count; a sett drawn too fast teaches nothing. Third, end the loop on a full repeat held for a beat, so the viewer sees the closed pattern before it begins again.

The history and structure of the GIF explains the constraints that produce these virtues: the limited palette, the frame-level timing, and the loop flag that makes a sequence repeat without instruction. They are the constraints tartan was born under as well.

Where does an animated sett belong on a clan site?

On the page that names the tartan, beside the threadcount and the register reference. The still photograph shows what the cloth looks like; the animation shows what the sett says; the text links the two. A society that publishes all three gives a descendant everything needed to commission the pattern correctly from any weaver alive.

The rest of that page's furniture is standard: the name, the reference, the variants in use, and the note on who may wear it, all set out the way the clan tartan entry sets them out. The animation is the small jewel in that setting.

Is it worth the effort?

For a clan society, yes, once. The animation is made a single time and then works for every visitor who has ever wondered how the pattern is actually woven. It is the cheapest piece of education a clan site can carry, and unlike most things on the internet, a correct animation of a correct sett does not date.

For the maker who wants to go further, the same sequence can be drawn at the loom's own resolution: each frame a single pick, each colour change a weft change, until the animation shows not just the sett's order but its weaving. That version takes longer to make and is the better teaching tool, because a visitor who has watched the cloth being woven pick by pick understands a threadcount the way a weaver does.

The finished file belongs in the clan site's page beside the still photograph and the written count: the three together are the complete record of a tartan, the look of it, the notation of it, and the order of its making. A society that publishes all three has told a descendant everything the sett knows how to say.