Following the introduction of the hand-woven tartan, the town’s Happy Feet Dance School were keen to use the design for their new costumes, necessitating the commissioning of a lighter mill-woven cloth. The fabric was re-designed to suit the finer thread, and a long process of selecting a mill and the correct colours was started, culminating in Strathmore Woollens being appointed to weave the tartan. A month of successful Kickstarter campaign to get the new fabric funded was the key to the project going ahead and generated lots of publicity for the ‘Tartan for the Town’ project. Three months in the making, the fabric finally arrived in the Artificer Studio on 10 July, well in time for the launch of the tartan on 22 August. Ashleigh comments “We still have a journey ahead of us to get the Blairgowrie Berries and Cherries products on the shelves, but we have plenty of orders to fulfil – keeping us busy”.

Renowned for the quality of raspberries produced in large volumes since the end of the nineteenth century, Blairgowrie is now home to a small but expanding late cherry industry. Thomas Thomson (Blairgowrie) Ltd, one of the forefathers of the raspberry industry, are now  helping to pioneer cherry production in Scotland - in the same fields that first grew raspberries over 100 years ago! Melanie Thomson explains “There have been  huge changes in fruit growing over the last 20 years; growers have had to be enterprising and react to the market demands - changing seasons, methods of production, varieties and even the types of berries grown – for example, blueberries, which have only really become a commercial crop in Scotland the last 10 years. Cherries are an exciting development for us because as with blueberries we are playing to Scotland’s natural strength of being late in the summer. We can, with the help of polytunnels, produce wonderful sweet juicy black cherries to supply supermarket shelves throughout the UK following on from the English crop and fresh from the fields of Blairgowrie. Unfortunately, we can't class a cherry as a berry - hence ‘Blairgowrie Berries and Cherries’ and also the crop definitely deserves to be promoted”!