Antonio Rodríguez began to penetrate before talking. His childhood was spent between needles, threads and leather pikes of different sizes because all the women in his family -mother, aunts and grandmothers- pierced, and as they were very modern they urged him to learn despite the fact that at that time it was not usual in a man and swarmed the prejudices. Of course, they advised him not to do it on the street.
He was the only child in the house because his cousins are older than him. His mother worked in the fields and left him in the care of his grandmothers and for him to stay still and shut up, one of them gave him a pique, the other made him pull strings “and that’s how I ended up,” he says. The truth is that he liked to be there with them, watching how they intertwined threads and helping them with the little tasks they entrusted to him.
Antonio worked in the hospitality sector, at a gas station, in supermarkets and even danced, but he could never get the needle out of his head and what was a hobby became his profession over the years: a fretwork craftsman, one of the few that remain on the island.
In 2015, his friend and designer Eduardo Martín made the costume for the children’s Queen of the Carnival made of rosette, one of the most representative crafts of the Archipelago, with special development in Tenerife and Lanzarote.
It was at that moment that the then Councilor for Commerce, Industry and Socioeconomic Development of the Cabildo de Tenerife, Efraín Medina, encouraged him to get his craftsman’s card to teach classes since few people knew the technique and considered it important to preserve and teach it. to future generations.
Antonio believed that crafts “didn’t make a living” but he listened to him and to this day he doesn’t regret it. “I feel privileged because I live from the rosette and fretwork classes I teach, I started with the town halls, associations and now I am all over the Island”, declares the artisan, a native of the Palo Blanco neighborhood, Los Realejos.
However, when he sits down to do it, there are still many people who confess that it is the first time they have seen a man doing it. She has an immediate answer for all of them: “we have two little hands and two eyes just like women, for women it is to give birth, from there up, everything for everyone,” she says with a smile as she attends her stall at the Flower and Plant Exhibition. and Crafts from Parque García Sanabria, in Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
He was accompanied by a group of women, students from his workshops in the tram square, in La Cuesta, Candelaria and San Miguel, because he moved his classes to this open space, so that all visitors could appreciate the work that is required to make an openwork or a rosette.
There he exhibits all his creations to this day, which range from traditional objects to costume jewelery made with this latest technique. “The traditional cloth and the table mat have gone down in history and it is necessary to modernize and adapt to the new times,” he emphasizes.
Both the fretwork and the rosette are two very difficult crafts that also do not work because it takes a lot of time and sight. “They are expensive jobs that don’t charge for the time you invest in them, he points out.
To make a “normal” rosette of 72 pins it can take 40 minutes, but then there are others that you have to spend between five or six days, up to 20 and even a month “working exclusively on it”.
Among his students are many males who show a great predisposition to learn. The thread and the needle have contributed to breaking stereotypes and putting aside the conventions and taboos that reigned when he was little and that forced many families to remain silent.
It tells the case of a man who made openwork flowers in the ‘biscuit’ style. The delivery girls who brought the marked fabrics to his house to be cut always entrusted it to his wife, considered one of the best. No one knew that there was a man behind that perfect job and that he did it when he came home from working in the banana plantation.
In addition to giving courses and workshops throughout the insular geography, the realejero artisan has participated in a project in schools consisting of bringing the fretwork and the rosette to mathematics classes. He works on geometry, symmetry, diameters and angles, always looking for the pins at the ends to add up to a number that is as divisible as possible, for example 36 or 60.
The retired professor of Mathematics in Secondary Education and Baccalaureate – one of the architects of the then Canary Islands Society of Isaac Newton Mathematics Teachers, Luis Balbuena Castellano, also produced a study of the geometry of the Canarian draft that won the Francisco Giner de los Ríos Award to educational improvement.
Antonio Rodríguez emphasizes the importance of making the rosette visible. “It is a craft that has disappeared despite the fact that it had a global reach, from America to Croatia, and it is the only lace of Spanish origin born in the Canary Islands”, he maintains. For this reason, he adds, it is important to transmit this manual ability typical of the Archipelago, so that it is not lost again.
