My Great Aunt Andrea

I will always remember the image of my great grand aunt on my father's side. Her name was Andrea Garcia Valdez. My family used to visit her in the 40's when I was a small child and she died when I was 12 and she was about 104. The image that has stayed in my mind all this years is of her sitting in front of her huge wood stove in her kitchen..the kind you see depicted in Christmas cards. She still cooked and cleaned her house when I was a child. She wore her shoulder length hair in a little bun held together with wire hairpins, which she sometimes placed on the stove front fender to redo her knotted bun of hair.
She was a widow with three sons in their 40's still living in the property, but in small houses of their own. her only daughter, the youngest married several times and had two sons and a daughter in their teens. Sometimes she too lived on the property or with her mother between marriages, but her children were a troublesome lot most of the time, getting into trouble. Both she and her daughter died young and Aunt Andrea and her middle aged sons had to deal wityh the two young boys.
The youngest of the three brothers, married and moved to Mexico with his wife, but the other two remained single all their lives. They showed a lot of respect and help to their mother as she aged. She was their bank...with two little cloth bags in different colors hanging on the inside of the waist of her skirt. Before they went shopping for anything, they would as her for the money and she would go to that respective little bag and give that son his money.
Both uncles were always talking about current event happening in those years because they always read the newspapers daily. they also both spoiled me with little presents. It was actually with some fabric that one of them, Nieves, gave me that I made my first dress for myself when I was 13. It was a weird color material of little triangles in orange and pink, but I did like it very much.
After they died, I lost track of my young cousins for many years, but saw the wife of one of them in Fort Worth in 1992.

Tomasita Villarreal

My aunt Tomasita Villarreal, my father's sister, was a seamstress well known in Rio Grande City for many years. Her specialty was wedding dresses and everything needed for a wedding. She made from scratch and showed me how to make the little white orange blossoms used in the wedding crown, the wedding lasso and the wedding corsages and the bride's bouquet! She could make all of it from scratch and they looked just like the ones bought in expensive boutiques. In fact her living room looked like a boutique.
She also made wonderful machine embroidery on blouses, dresses and even pillow cases or other linen. She was very talented. I will never for get the things she created. She had a lot of patience in her work.

Quilting in my Family

Quilting in my family was very important when I was a child. My mother and some of my aunts all made quilted blocks and made them into quilts.. I remember my mother carding wool given to her by her brother from his own sheep. When the wool was first brought home by my mother from her brother's place was all rough and had thorns and stuff that the sheep got into, before the wool was sheared off the sheep. She had wooden cards, or wooden paddles with nail-like things to kind of clean out and sort out the wool to prepare it to be used as the stuffing put between two fabric parts--the front part made up of pieced blocks and the backing, sometimes made from one color or pieced also. She had huge wooden frames, to hold the basted quilt to work in the patterned quilted stich lines. Sometimes she would make a quick tuffed quilt, putting in tufts of thread scattered throughout the quilt instead of stitching lines.
Sometimes instead of a pieced quilt she would make an appliqued one. I remember one she made appliqueing fan shaped forms to each block. Another one had the little sunshine girl with a sunbonnet applique. She also made one with pansy appliques.

Paper Flower Wreaths

I have mentioned before that my mother made flowers as a hobby. These are the kind made with crepe paper used in that time of the 40's and 50's very frequently by hispanic women, in Mexico and the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. The crepe paper had a certain stretchability that was very useful, especially when making roses. Rose petals were cut and stretched into the shape of real rose petals and then arranged aroung a wire to shape into a rose and tied with a slim wire, usually pulled out of a piece of screen window wire. These flowers and some made like carnations were then arranged into a wreath. These wreaths were used at funerals or taken to the cemetary to decorate tombs, especially on November on the day of the dead.
My mother used to make many wreaths to go visit the cemetary burying places of all her relatives whenever we could go all the way to Escobares, near Rio Grande City, Texas. As a child I used to make some small wreaths about 12 inches round for all the relatives too, all by myself. This is how i learned to make paper flowers, by copying my mother.

Mother's Day in my Childhood

When I was a child in the Rio Grande Valley, Weslaco's hispanic community celebrated Mother's Day by wearing a small artificial flower on their lapel--a red one if their mother was alive or a white one if she were dead. These small individual artificial flowers were usually sold at the local 5 and 10 downtown store, but more often than not, they were peddled door to door a few days before Mother's Day in May.
Since making crepe flowers was one of my mother's hobbies, I took the task of making 30 to 50 small crepe paper flowers, mostly in red, but some in white too. I remember they looked like little carnations. My mother contributed the crepe paper and my father the wire. The wire was usually the copper looking little wires inside a thick wire, usually left over from car repairs. It was very flexible and could be covered with twisted crepe paper, after the little flower was finished.
There were certain steps I took with each flower. Using a piece of wire about 4 or 5 inches, I would tie 2 or 3 small pieces of yellow crepe paper on the tip, twisting the wire to hold the bits of paper in place to be the flower center. Around this center I would wound a strip of crepe paper, usually 18 to 20 inches long and just about 1 1/2 or 2 inches wide, with the edges on one side cut or slit to look like flower petals. I would tie this to form the flower with a small screen window wire. Then I would cover the flower stem, or wire with green crepe paper strip. A piece of fern from my mother's garden would then finish the tiny corsage and I usually added a straight pin for pinning it to the lapel. My aunt Fita would go with me door to door to sell them for 25 cents each, usually late in the afternoon to escape the hot sun of may in the Valley. I then used this money to buy my mother a mother's day present.

My Fascinating Childhood

I had a very fascinating childhood, even though I usually spent my time by myself. Beginning with the creating little houses and dollhouse furniture with paper, I soon moved on to sewing doll clothes, embroidering and even water coloring after first trying working with wax crayons.
I had an eight inch little doll, since we still didn't have Barbie yet. I made tiny shorts, blouses and everything I saw in the magazines, such as Saturday Evening Post. I still remember a magazine article showing the wardrobe of one of my favorite movie stars, and of course i tried to copy it for my little doll. I even made shoes for her in little tiny details, including shoelaces.

My First Christmas Tree

I still remember my very first Christmas tree. It was way back in 1952, when I was eight years old living in Kenedy, Texas. I took a branch from a normal garden tree, not a fir tree at all, and planted it into some dirt I put in a cardboard box. This little tree, about two feet high, was decorated with paper decorations made by me and colored by me, without any adult help at all. I drew some birds, copying them from a coloring book, but I didn't trace them. I colored them and cut them out, but since they were drawn on regular paper, they didn't hold a very stiff form at all,but I was happy with them. I colored and folded paper fans and added my gum wrapper chains and I was happy. I later kept adding candy wrapper little things if the wrappers were shiny.
I made the whole box into a little villege by making folded paper houses and even a small bird house, with paper.
The following year, in Weslaco, my dad bought me a two foot fir tree at the grocery store and I made paper decorations for that one, using a book on paper folding to add more things. That tree had a sting of lights with eight little lights(about an inch long different colored lights).
Since then, I had a real fir tree evey year, usually two or three foot tall a nd I usually arranged it on a table by the window in the living room of my mother's house.
The first year, that I didn't have my own tree was the year I got married-1970! At Christmas i was living with my sister-in-law in Weslaco and she had a silver artificial tree.
The following year with a sall child, I bought a small three foot artificial, but green and very real looking tree. I used my old Christmas ornaments, some store bought ones I had added throughout the years. I kept using the same artificial tree for many years.
In 1992, my daughter bought me a 5 foot one, artificial and green too. It looked very real. this was not replaced until 2008 by a newer one.
This year(2009), I decided to finally go back to a real one, not having had a REAL one since 1969! This was the first year I didn't have cats or kids in the house! I loved the smell of fir --it seemed to fill the whole house with a real Christmas smell!
It was a wonderful experience, but it dried too much by the time I took it off, because I usually keep my tree until the 6th of January, the Day of the Three Kings.