Dorothy Jean Ernst:
My mom collected fans from when she was very young, and kept a lot of them in this tooled leather box. When I found it and opened the lid, I was drawn back to when I was little, and allowed to handle the fans verrrrry gently.
I'm not sure what if anything used to be in the small leather frame, it is empty now. But the fans are still bright and colorful. This one is my favorite (for obvious reasons).
And I promise I opened them verrrrry gently.
Unfortunately I don't know where they came from. She collected them in her early days I think. They were kept at my grandmother's house like maybe they were from her teen and high school days, or maybe college. I was imagining that servicemen would buy them overseas and bring them back as gifts, but that is only a guess. Virginia might know.
I, too, found a lot of old copies of the Delta Gamma publication Anchora. Gramma very helpfully told me which issue, and what page, to look for info about her:
That was nice of her. Here's her picture..
There she is! I love the fashion for posing for photos back then, very hollywood starlet-ish with the dramatic lighting and gazing pensively off to the side. She was such a social person, always the belle of the ball!
A pair of Spanish castanets. I remember these from the drawer-of-miscellany in a spare chest of drawers that sat on the upstairs landing in my grandmother's house. She would scoot a stool up and let me sit and explore the little treasures she had stashed in the top drawer. (this was actually a dangerous spot to be in, since leaning back a bit too far would have sent me falling headfirst over the banister) I really think this is where my love of tiny things originated, as I would spend hours totally absorbed in the bits and bobs that my magpie grandmother had accumulated. I was given a number of these tiny talismans at some point, and I still have horrible memories of the first garage sale I ever held, when a box of them that wasn't supposed to be in the sale was carted off by a jerk who bullied me into selling them despite my protests. *sob*
Ahem... moving on.
I found the castanets wrapped in newspaper from 1973 which is around the time my grandparents moved from Corpus to California. They were probably given to my mom around then. I have a sense that I've heard where they came from to begin with, but I can't recall it. I think somewhere there is a photo of either my mother or my aunt dressed in a Spanish costume, and I recently found a lace mantilla that probably was part of the ensemble. No clue what the occasion might have been.
I remember trying to learn how to play them. Totally unsuccessful. If you'd like to see some awesome castanet playing, check out this cool video on youtube.
What exactly are castinets? And were they actually Mildred's, or had someone given them to her?
These are so cool! Where did she collect them from? travels? shops?