HARLINGEN — Twenty-eight years ago, Rosemary Berry planned to make comforters to help keep poor children warm during the winter.
But soon, her project turned into an annual tradition at Park Place Estates RV Resort.
Last month, she and a group of residents stitched up their 10,000th comforter.
“That was a goal I was hoping we could make,” Berry, a retired medical secretary from Churubusco, Ind., said.
But she didn’t dream she’d make it.
In 1988, Berry visited a Reynosa orphanage where children didn’t have blankets to keep them from the cold.
So, she and a group of park residents stitched their first comforter.
“We started with nothing,” Berry said about the group’s supplies.
Soon, park residents were donating fabric to make the thick, colorful comforters.
Every year, when Winter Texans pull into the RV park, they’re hauling fabric, yarn and thread.
The mobile home industry has even chipped in.
A group of Indiana mobile home manufacturers has packed trailers en route to the Rio Grande Valley’s mobile home outlets with rolls of fabric.
“We have been so blessed with donations from all over the United States,” Berry said.
Over the years, the group made up of as many as 65 residents has turned the park’s activity hall into a little factory.
Berry calls it “an assembly line.”
On long tables, a group of women cuts out fabric into 6- to 10-inch blocks.
Then, another group lays out the blocks into patterns.
Next, co-workers sew together the fabric before a group of eight places the fabric into 6- to 8-foot wooden frames.
Then, they sew knots that tie together the layers of fabric.
Through the years, Berry has handed down the park’s tradition to new residents.
Of the original group, she’s the last.
“It’s been such a blessing,” she said.
