houndstooth

thumb|Houndstooth pattern Houndstooth is a pattern of alternating light and dark checks used on fabric. It is also known as hounds tooth check, '''hound's tooth (and similar spellings), dogstooth, dogtooth or dog's tooth'''. The duotone pattern is characterized by a tessellation of light and dark solid checks alternating with light-and-dark diagonally-striped checks—similar in pattern to gingham plaid but with diagonally-striped squares in place of gingham's blended-tone squares. Traditionally, houndstooth uses black and white, although other contrasting colour combinations may be used.

==History== The oldest Bronze Age houndstooth textiles found so far are from the Hallstatt Celtic Salt Mine, Austria, 1500–1200 BC. One of the best known early occurrences of houndstooth is the Gerum Cloak, a garment uncovered in a Swedish peat bog, dated to between 360 and 100 BC. Contemporary houndstooth checks may have originated as a pattern in woven tweed cloth from the Scottish Lowlands, but are now used in many other woven fabrics aside from wool. The traditional houndstooth check is made with alternating bands of four dark and four light threads in both warp and weft/filling woven in a simple 2:2 twill, two over/two under the warp, advancing one thread each pass. In an early reference to houndstooth, De Pinna, a New York City–based men's and women's high-end clothier founded in 1885, included houndstooth checks along with gun-club checks, and Scotch plaids as part of its 1933 spring men's suits collection. The actual term houndstooth for the pattern is not recorded before 1936.