Every needle stitch, every thread that crosses from one point to another, every turn of the crochet hook, a well-made edge keeps moments of concentration, silence, calm, illusion, and serenity. In front of the TV, sitting on the sofa, Mònica finds her moment with any craft she is working on, artisanally, like the wool shawl she will have ready for when winter arrives.
In the back room of her haberdashery, the sewing machine works. On the table, some yellow, blue, pink, and green plaid fabric bags are getting ready to leave with the customers. They are the gift Mònica gives them to thank them for being able to spend fifteen years since she first opened the blind.
And she expresses her gratitude in a text printed on a small piece of paper that she delivers with the bag she herself has cut and sewn. It says: “Practically, without realizing it, fifteen years have passed. Although the day-to-day of a shop is very heavy, I always keep all of you in mind, the customers, the friends, the people from the neighborhood who help me survive in such complicated times for small businesses. Producing each of these bags is a therapy, it is thinking about lived moments, conversations, confessions, smiles, tears, it is dedicating a little while to thank you for your trust. I sincerely hope you like it. Thank you very much for being there!”
Producing each of these bags is a therapy, it is thinking about lived moments, conversations, confessions, smiles, tears...
This gift, this detail speaks of Mònica's character, and that is what fosters the warmth of her haberdashery, at the corner of Biscaia and Olesa streets, in el Congrés i els Indians neighborhood. The shop is called Núvol de fils (Cloud of Threads). “One day I came home and saw that my cat had opened the sewing box and had taken out all the threads and made a tangle that was like a cloud of threads,” she explains. But that mess of threads inspired the name of the craft shop that Mònica had probably never imagined having.
She is from El Prat de Llobregat, her mother, with three children, three girls of whom Mònica is the eldest, passed the competitive exams to become a teacher. “At the nuns' school, I had learned to sew and do crafts. And on Saturday afternoons, she would give each of the three daughters a small cloth handkerchief to finish the hem and sew buttons on it. And so we spent the afternoon, sewing. I was passionate about that,” she says.
And from the handkerchief, the sisters went on to make bags and clothes for their dolls. “On Sundays we would go to the football field to watch Prat (AE Prat, Associació Esportiva Prat) play and that way we could show off the bags we had made. I liked to explore with color and textures, and at twelve or thirteen, for Three Kings' Day, I wanted to make, as a surprise, one-piece pajamas for my sisters. My mother accompanied me to buy the fabric and with a pair of my father's pajamas we took the pattern.”
Household chores
After a few years of pause, focused on her studies, doing industrial design and interior design, at twenty-one, when she became independent, she resumed crochet and sewing. “That was nostalgia,” she says. Having wool and thread in her hands again, needles and thimble, made her feel at home again. “In the summer, when we went to visit my grandmother in the village of Dueñas, in Palencia, I would see her work a lot with perlé and she would make us some crochet pieces to put under each foot and that way, sliding with that, we wouldn't dirty the house floor with the soles of our shoes.”
At carnival time, costumes were always made at home. Now she is very grateful for “the luck we had that at home they stimulated our creativity a lot.” It is what now makes her enjoy most the selection of fabrics, threads, wools and all kinds of materials for crafts and manualities. You enter Mònica's shop and the colors, the possibilities of making anything assault your mind, your eyes, the desire to start doing crafts, handmade Christmas gifts, personalizing a plain t-shirt, a bag, a wallet with buttons and ribbons of infinite patterns and designs. There are fabrics to make clothes, cover cushions, liven up a corner of the house with squares, flowers, lines or fluorescent tones that are highly energizing.
Her hobby of patchwork led her to find out that a neighborhood haberdashery was being transferred. Those who knew her encouraged her to take it. And she did. She capitalized on unemployment and registered as self-employed. That was fifteen years ago. When COVID closed all businesses, she, with fabric and filter, made as many masks as she could: more than five hundred. At home, she had everything to make them. She still doesn't understand why haberdasheries were not considered essential, when stationers and bookstores were because they sold entertainment for children. "Crafts were the great forgotten," she says, recalling all the good they did for her. "Knitting, macramé, crochet, and embroidery were my refuge."
Knitting, macramé, crochet, and embroidery were my refuge.
She says what she likes most is creating and thinking about how she will make things in a way that allows her to optimize material and do it in few steps, "I really enjoy thinking about how to do it." She advances in her crochet stitch or embroidery with the TV in the background, where she puts on series like Friends, or movies like Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, or Zoolander, which she has already seen many times and, therefore, provide enough company, but no distraction. "Crafts transport and give calm. If it weren't so, they would be an obligation," she comments. And, furthermore, -she adds- "they make you feel a certain pleasure because you are building an object, you yourself are capable of becoming more autonomous and that gives you more security."
Weaving emotions
Mònica confesses that she is not at all a perfectionist. "I have many clients who are, but I mainly seek to distract myself." While sewing the store's birthday bags, she explains that tears have come to her eyes "thinking about the people who are no longer here, clients, difficult moments for the store over these fifteen years, decisions I have made. It has been a review of all this time, while sewing. Sewing or knitting is not just a physical activity; in every stitch of a craft, you put emotions. When I make a doll for someone, I think about that person all the time."
In the shop, Mònica has also woven many ties with the neighborhood and made many friendships. Apart from the customers who buy sewing or craft materials from her, in the back room there is the workshop table, small courses to learn machine sewing, knitting, crochet, and patchwork. Among the younger clientele, she says there are many who clearly seek to do crafts to detox from screens. They see on TikTok how someone does it all, which seems super easy to do, but then they see that it requires work. "What I like most is seeing that many people have trusted me because they arrived saying: I won't know how to do this, but they try, they let themselves be advised, and they try. I tell them: if it doesn't work out the first time, it will eventually, I never judge whether they know how to do it or not. But it's nice that people trust your judgment. Some have even created their own brand of bags."
"I can only thank all that I have received from the customers and the neighborhood"
"I can only thank all that I have received from the customers and the neighborhood," she says. She especially remembers when she had to change premises, without leaving el Congrés i els Indians, and how the people from the festival committee, friends, and family rallied to help her with the move of everything. They emptied a haberdashery that had been open for forty years, to place everything in a new space. "What have I done for them to help me so much," she wondered. And as a shopkeeper, it saddens her that lifelong businesses close, like the only shoe store there was, which closed, and now there is no shoe store in the neighborhood.
That's why she considers the Neighborhood Use Plan so necessary, the regulation of activities in public spaces, to be able to decide which shops truly build community and serve the people who live there. "People need to become aware of the value of knowing your name in shops, of being known, and that your daughter can enter a shop if at some point she needs help because she feels threatened by someone. Those who buy everything online probably don't think that this harms neighborhood commerce."
Passing through the door of Núvol de Fils, the infinite colors of the yarns, fabrics, buttons, ribbons, and threads inspire craftsmanship, creativity, and contemplation at home watching a project progress. In this haberdashery, you know you are in an oasis of proximity, of neighborhood ties.
On the Instagram nuvoldefils, where Mònica shares ideas and news from the shop, she presents her shop by stating what is done there: Creative sewing to be happy... Perhaps happiness is indeed made of small stitches, of mending the little holes that life makes in this handkerchief that is the world. And it's good to know that, in a corner of Barcelona, one is taught to sew a piece of happiness, enjoying a time of escape, of conversation and confidences, of overcoming, of personal pride, of self-esteem, of personal creation and enrichment.