The Full Monty

Depending on how moved you are by packaging you may or may not find this an interesting post... I have spent all most all of my life with only only a very modest interest in packaging, however the past month has seen my emotional engagement with packaging go from 'minimal' to 'obsessive'. For those of you who share my current obsession with packaging I hope you find the following striptease-like sequence of photos as exciting as I do.

The Hill Jacket in Brown

A couple of weeks ago an experiment arrived back from the factory: the Hill Jacket in brown shu, with brown horn buttons and a dark green moleskin collar lining.

Shu comes in shades of grey, from almost white to almost black. The grades are achieved by mixing darker and lighter wool. The kailey sheep which produces the wool used for shu doesn't come in brown, so walnuts soaked in water are used to achieve a quite unusual range of redy, beigey browny hues. Shu is not dyed into any other colours.

I think the experiment was a success!

Matching Fabric Samples

I have been going through swatches of different English-made tweed-like fabrics from the venerable mill Abraham Moon and Sons (established in 1837). Moon's range of lambswool and merino wool cloths compliment the more robust shu very well indeed, so I am keen to use Moon's cloths with shu in future Hindu Kush jackets. The soft handle of Moon's cloth can be employed very usefully around the collar of my jackets, so that the wearer's face comes into contact with something slightly more comforting than the shu. (I don't want to put shu down, it's handle is soft too, not scratchy like a thorn-proof cloth).

In the most recent Hindu Kush jacket, currently calling it's self the 'Donegalistan' British cloth and shu compliment each other very well indeed. It is something which I am super keen to build on in future jackets!

Swatches from Moon's and shu.

Shu swatch

The Donegal tweed used in the Donegalistan

The Donegalistan with tweed collar and piping.

Coloured Paper Labels

I have come up with a design for the labels which will hang from my clothes when they grace the planet's chiquest boutiques.

One bears the Tirich Mir Hindu Kush logo, the other a diagram of the making and export of the clothes and the final is handwritten for each garment; detailing size, style and date of manufacture.

The three labels.

The labels as they would hang in a shop.

Spreadsheets

I feel guilty as I haven't been able to offer you any images of clothes. This is because for the past three months I haven't been doing any designing, instead I have been applying for loans, calculating tax and working out stock levels. This means spreadsheets and I am not a natural, so I have drawn you a picture of me VS the spreadsheet.

Merry Chaumos!

Apologies for the lack of posts over the last three months. I have been busy with financing the company and pushing through an order from the factory, so very little interesting to report!

I thought instead I would give a little update about what is happening among the Kalasha who live in Chitral, the region where our cloth is from.

The Kalasha follow a unique and ancient faith. They celebrate seasonal festivals linked to the solstices, much like our pre-Christian ancestors did (that is for those of us who live in Europe).

In the Kalash Valleys a few days ago the Chaumos celebrations drew to a close. The most important festival of the Kalasha calendar, Chaumos celebrates the winter solstice and prepares the Kalasha for the year to come.

Below is a drawing I made during Chaumos in 2008, it is of a young Kalasha friend who has a cold. He is tucked up in bed, with the traditional remedy of burnt goat horn applied to his face.

Here is a clip of some film which I shot on the same trip. It records the special dough flocks and their shepherd that are made in one of the many rituals carried out during Chaumos.

This clip records the grinding of walnuts which make up the filing for a special bread baked during Chaumos. Traditionally the walnuts are processed in a pestle and mortar, but the family I stayed with were experimenting with a newly bough mechanical grinder from the market.

This last clip records another Chaumos ritual, the drawing of stylised markhor on the Gestakhan temple. Markhor are a magnificent variety of mountain goat with spectacular corkscrew horns. In the Kalasha cosmology markhor are amongst the purist of creatures, shepherded by the pure spirits of the high mountains. 

The Arrival of the Donegalistan


Here it is, only hours out of the tailors, modeled -for expediency's sake- by yours truly:

The cut is more generous than previous jackets, but still elegant. I could fit a thin jumper underneath, but little more. There is space around the chest though, so a thick sleeveless cardigan would probably feel fine, or even -for the more traditional gent- a waistcoat.

The collar and piping is of super-soft Donegal tweed and the lining is a heavy twill. There is a thin layer of fleece in there too, between the cloth and the twill, so the jacket feels heavy and robust... It feels like it could stop a saber slash.