The Inherited Loom
Mothers, Grandmothers, and the Joy of Making
Today, I’m sharing some personal insights about my passion for crafts. In the future, I might also share other aspects that have made me who I am today.
Right at the start of the textile course in Kranj (BIENN), we were asked to share our earliest memory of the textile world while sewing a button onto a classmate’s clothes. That act of talking while working with my hands triggered very vivid memories of my mother and my childhood.
At home, my mother always had several projects on the go: a half-finished sweater, a piece of lace on the bobbin lace pillow to create a curtain, a handkerchief, or some decor. We had cross-stitch frames in many rooms, and a macrame tapestry hung in the living room.
We used to spend a lot of time on the road because we were originally from a town in Barcelona but lived in another one in Valencia. During all those hours in the car, my mother was always working on her crafts. Some memories are even more peculiar, like waiting for my father to finish work while doing bobbin lace, leaning against some trees in the middle of a small wood.
She learned to sew and cross-stitch at school in 1960s Spain, a time when children also went to school on Saturdays to pray and learn some techniques, girls were taught how to sew while the boys did woodworking. When she was 5 or 6, they used to take her to stay with an aunt who lived near the beach for a “change of air” (she was a very bad eater and they thought that maybe changing scenery would help), and there, the tieta (auntie) from Sant Pere taught her how to knit and do bobbin lace, skills she would later perfect at the Arts i Oficis school in Olesa de Montserrat.
While my mother kept this passion for textiles as a hobby, a generation earlier, both my maternal and paternal grandmothers spent their entire working lives surrounded by threads and fabrics.
My maternal grandmother was born in a textile mill village, the Colonia Sedó in Esparreguera (founded in 1846). She worked there for a while, and after getting married, she started a job making housecoats and headscarves. Later on, she went back to the textile mills until she retired, working with looms that, unfortunately, severely damaged her hearing.
My paternal grandmother, after emigrating from Andalusia where she worked in the fields and with animals, spent her whole life working at the Juan Dalmases bedsheet factory in Olesa de Montserrat. I remember her making aprons, tablecloths, and handkerchiefs for the whole family.
Returning to the present, to my day-to-day life, it doesn’t surprise me that I am so passionate about crafts and things made with love. I wish I could show them everything I’ve become; I think they would be very proud. Though I see a glimpse of that in my mother (and mother-in-law) every time I show them my latest creation.
In my case, the textile world—the knitting, the bobbin lace, and the cross-stitch my mother taught me—opened the door for me to self-teach other techniques: crochet, micro-macrame, tatting, plant dyeing, linoprint, bookbinding, screen printing...
Sometimes, because of my family or my own beliefs shaped by experience, I’ve felt that all these things I did weren’t “useful” because they didn’t always result in a final product that brought a financial profit. With age, reflection, and more awareness, I’ve come to learn that not everything has to lead to a “marketable” product, but that there is also pure pleasure in simply making.