Cute Young Blonde Girl Undresses Her Tartan Mini Skirt

Depending upon how "different tartan" is defined, it has been estimated that there are about 3,500 to 7,000 different tartans, with around 150 new designs being created every year. With four ways of presenting the hues in the tartan – "modern", "ancient", "weathered" and "muted" colours – there are thus between about 14,000 recognized tartan variations to choose from. (The 7,000 figure above includes many of these variations counted as if different tartans).
Up until recently there had been no central, official tartan registry. In the absence of an official register, several independent organisations located in Scotland, Canada and the US documented and recorded tartan. In the 1960s, a Scottish society called the Scottish Tartans Society (now defunct) was created to record and preserve all known tartan designs. The society's register, the Register of All Publicly Known Tartans (RAPKT), contains about 2,700 different designs of tartan. The society, however, ran into financial troubles in about the year 2000, and folded. Former members of the society then formed two new Scottish-based organisations – the Scottish Tartans Authority (STA) and the Scottish Tartans World Register (STWR). Both of these societies initially based their databases on the RAPKT. The STA's database, the International Tartan Index (ITI) consists of about 3,500 different tartans (with over 7,000, counting variants), as of 2004. The STWR's self-titled Scottish Tartans World Register database is made up of about 3,000 different designs as of 2004. Both organisations are registered Scottish charities and record new tartans (free in the case of STS and for a fee in the case of STWR) on request. The STA's ITI is larger in part because it has absorbed the entries recorded in the TartanArt database formerly maintained by the merged International Association of Tartan Studies and Tartan Educational and Cultural Association (IATS/TECA), based in the United States, and with whom the STA is directly affiliated.
The Scottish Register of Tartans (SRT) is Scotland's official tartan register. The SRT is maintained and administrated by the National Archives of Scotland (NAS), a statutory body based in Edinburgh. The aim of the Register is to provide a definitive and accessible resource to promote and preserve tartan. It also aims to be the definitive source for the registration of new tartans (that pass NAS criteria for inclusion). The register itself is made up of the existing registers of the STA and the STWR as they were at the time of the SRT's launch, and new registrations from February 5, 2009 onward. On the Register's website users can register new tartans (for a fee), search for and request the threadcounts of existing tartans and receive notifications of newly registered tartans. One criticism of the SRT and NAS's management of it is that its exclusivity, in both cost and criteria, necessarily mean that it cannot actually achieve its goals of definiteness, preservation and open access. The current version of the STA's ITI, for example, already contains a large number of tartans that do not appear in the SRT, and the gulf will only widen under current policy.