Origin Stories | Niamh

Niamh works from a dye house that faces the Atlantic, which means the palette is written by the weather rather than by her. She has made peace with this in the way you make peace with a landlord.

Three mornings a week

She forages three mornings a week — sea beet, dulse, lichen — and freely admits that half of what she brings back gives nothing at all. The failures go in a bucket. The bucket goes on the garden.

The half that does

The half that does gives colours you cannot buy: a grey-green that shifts toward the sea, a soft rust that arrives on the third dip and nowhere else. People drive two hours to see the cloth. She finds this funny. The drive, she says, is the seasoning.

• Sea beet, which gives a green so quiet most people read it as undyed.

• Dulse, dried on the rocks and then in a low oven, until the colour turns savoury.

• Lichen, used sparingly, because it is exactly as assertive as it sounds.

The apron problem

She goes through aprons at a rate that alarms her accountant. Linen, she has decided, is the only cloth that survives salt water and a hot vat in the same day.

Written by weather

There is no fixed palette and there never will be. On a bad week the rail holds four colours. Nobody has ever asked for a refund. The pieces she dyes for us appear in the everyday collection, and never twice in quite the same shade.