Neither of them moved, and Rachel had a sudden, overwhelming urge to reach up and kiss him, which was absolutely the worst idea ever. Before she could act on the impulse, she turned and fumbled with the latch on the gate.
“Okay. Good night, Conall.”
He waited as she opened the gate and only when she was inside and closing the door did he climb back into his car. She listened as he drove away, until finally she couldn’t hear the engine anymore, and only then did she make her way upstairs to her room. Flinging herself across her bed, she stared at the moon through the window and acknowledged she might be in a wee bit of trouble.
Chapter Four
When Rachel arrived at McDermott Mills the following morning, it was to discover Fiona had been unexpectedly called to Dublin to meet with a client, and likely would not return until the following week. As a result, Rachel spent the next several days on the manufacturing floor, under the guidance of the mill manager, Timothy Connelly. An older man who had worked at the mill for nearly forty years, he was a patient and humorous instructor, demonstrating how the massive looms were warped and programmed to automatically weave an intended pattern, and how the finished fabrics were inspected, washed and dried, and then inspected again before being rolled onto large bolts.
Rachel had worked at her family textile factory every summer since she’d turned fifteen, but McDermott Mills was an entirely different experience, mostly because the scale of the operation was so much smaller. She truly had the sense of being involved in something very personal.
She hadn’t expected to see Fiona at all until the following week, but when she arrived at the mill on Friday morning, it was to discover she had returned from Dublin early and had brought her small pug, Grace, to work with her. Now she and Rachel were in the design room on the second floor of the brick mill building. An enormous wooden worktable covered in black cloth dominated the room. Sunlight flooded through the tall windows and on a nearby wall hung a large vision board, also covered in black fabric, which featured a dozen or more swatches of different tweeds grouped together by color and design. The room was large and airy and yet, it felt curiously intimate as she and Fiona bent over the table and examined an assortment of yarns, fabric swatches, and photographs of nature, while Grace snored softly beneath the table. Fiona was in the beginning stages of designing a pattern for a luxury women’s clothing line.
“We weave and design fabrics here for our own collections,” she said. “But we also ship to international designers. Those patterns are, of course, proprietary. We’re best known for our tweeds and suits, but we also have a full lifestyle collection for men and women.”
Rachel knew McDermott Mills employed their own apparel designers, but she had not yet visited the retail shop located in the center of town, and made a mental note to stop there on her way home.
“How much of your sales is for just the fabric, and how much is for finished clothing?” she asked.
“Oh, you’d have to speak to the sales department for that information,” Fiona said. “At a guess, I’d say it’s a fifty-fifty split, but I’m honestly not sure. We produce fabrics two years in advance of when they’ll actually be available to the public as garments.”
Sorting through the dozens of photos strewn across the table, Rachel picked up a photograph of a field awash in pale-green and gold grasses, blooming with deep-pink and purple heather against a pine forest. Overhead, the sky was a vivid cerulean blue. “This is so beautiful. I absolutely love the colors.”
“Yes, that’s a nice one. I took it not too far from here,” Fiona said. “Nature so often provides us with a beautiful palette of colors. My goal is to capture those hues in a gorgeous plaid pattern.”
“That sounds lovely,” Rachel commented. “The colors will really evoke the surrounding countryside. Is the next step to go through the yarns and select the shades that most closely match those in the photo?”
“There are a couple of ways to pull the colors from the photo,” Fiona said. “I have this particular photo on my computer and I set the resolution to a really low number in order to see the individual pixels. I create my own palette by selecting colors from the pixel squares, then arrange them in shaded order.”
She withdrew a second copy of the photo that had a series of colored blocks beneath it, perfectly capturing the hues found in the photo, ranging from the palest pink to deep forest green.
“What do you envision for a pattern?” Rachel asked.
“For these colors, I might choose a windowpane check pattern, using a combination of lambswool and cashmere. That will keep it light, but luxurious. I envision a fabric that would be perfect as a skirt or a spring jacket, or even a shawl.”
“Lovely,” Rachel murmured, fingering a skein of mauve lambswool. “It must be difficult to select the actual yarns, though. There are so many to choose from.”
Fiona smiled. “Actually, that’s the fun part. I bring my palette downstairs to where we store the yarns and make my selections from those that best match my photo.” She indicated the assortment of skeins on the table. “These are the yarns I initially chose, but now I have to narrow them down to just five or six. More than that, and it might look a bit muddled.”
“Seamus did show me the finished bolts of fabric, but I would love to see where the yarns are kept,” Rachel said.
“Let’s head down there,” Fiona said, setting a swatch down on the table. “I’ll show you the archives, too, where we keep a sample of every pattern that’s ever been created here.”
The yarn was stored in a large room adjacent to where the weaving looms were located, and entry to the room was allowed only after checking in with a woman at a nearby desk. Fiona had to raise her voice to be heard over the rhythmic pounding of the power looms.
“This is where we keep both our yarns and our archived patterns. In order to retain control over our inventory and our proprietary patterns, this area is controlled,” she explained. “We once hired a designer who was secretly working for a competitor, and several designs went missing before we realized what happened. Now, no one is allowed to remove any pattern sample from this room without authorization.”
Rachel nodded. Lakeside Industries employed similar measures to protect their designs, so she understood. She looked around with interest. One wall of the room was fitted with a hundred or more wooden dowels and from each dowel hung a skein of yarn, identified by a tag.
“These are all the current yarns we have in stock,” Fiona explained. “If I wanted to use a particular yarn, I would make note of the stock number on the tag. We also have a catalog, here, of the different yarns that are available to order from our suppliers, and we attend exhibitions several times a year to select new yarns and threads. Over here are the yarns that have already been loaded onto spindles and are ready to be moved into the weaving room.”
She indicated a series of floor-to-ceiling steel shelves loaded with thick spindles of thread in every color imaginable. There were hundreds of spindles, each of them several feet long.
“Where does the yarn come from?” Rachel asked. “Is it all from Ireland?”
“Sadly, no. Most Irish wool is very rough and not suitable for clothing, although we do have a nice merino wool that we sell for handknitting. The bulk of our yarns are imported from New Zealand and Australia because it’s longer and softer, and more suited to the luxury fabric we produce.”