Maria Carolina Santos

Generations of weavers

Maria Carolina Santos was born in 1956 in the parish of Cabeça Santa. Currently lives in the parish of Oldrões and makes a workshop of her home. Niece of Carolina and Lucilia Rocha, the famous Gumarães’ weavers, she was influenced, at the age of ten, by the art of linen that passed from generation to generation. In the core family, with great-grandmother, grandmother, mother and aunts, she learned what precedes the weaving process: swingling, hackling, spinning, yarning in pieces, bleaching and reeling.

On the loom offered by her father, «second hand and over three hundred years old», she makes bedspreads, bedroom sets, curtains, towels and napperons, taking inspiration from the cross stitch magazines that she buys and keeps. About the future, she dreams about «creating a school dedicated to flax, from planting to the final product after passing the loom».