Manos a la Obra: Mini-Altar Decoration

Hi everyone, my name is Evelyn and I’m going to be teaching you how to start with your decorations for your altar! Okay, in your box you should have found some candles some right here, and tissue paper with some pipe cleaners, we’ll need that for making our marigold and some instruction so some sheets of instruction, a sheet you can fill out and talk about with your family, just some questions about the members family members you want to remember. And this coloring sheet of skulls so you have some you can draw in and create your own style of skull, that’s pretty cool! I actually made some, painted those, and I made this little like folding paper thing in the back so it could stand and it’ll be a great addition to my altar! So I’ll put these aside. I’m gonna show you how we can do our paper flowers. Our marigolds they represent, you know it’s la flor de los muertos, so the flower of the dead. So when we see it in the day of the dead we have a lot of these, people get real ones, or they make some.

01:16 - We are going to make some with our tissue paper. So we did get this big old sheet. Let’s see, huge tissue paper, but what we’re going to want is probably a size like this. So what I’m going to do is cut it you know this way and then cut it that way so that we can get about the size we want. Right, let me see where are my scissors? Okay, so I’m gonna cut down this way, just follow the line. Cool! We’re gonna stack those on top of each other and then we’re gonna go the other way.

02:17 - I’m going to put this one aside, you can save it for later, if you want to do some papel picado, like hanging, I made these really cool skull ones, but we do have another video where we show you more in depth about papel picado and the history about it so feel free to watch that later as well. But we have this half and I’m going to do one more cut, and it’ll be about this size. This size will get you something like this, so anything smaller will get you a little smaller one so you can do that as well. I like this medium size. I’m just gonna cut that, and now they’re stacked perfect! Next up, we’re going to fold this accordion style. I’ll just do this you notice right here I have orange, yellow, orange, yellow, so it’s a pattern.

03:14 - It’ll look really nice on our flower once we open it up so we’ll keep folding accordion style. And you’re going to start looking for your pipe cleaner; note you did get three pipe cleaners, you can make multiple flowers if you’d like! So maybe this layer that I have here might be, you know, a very, very fluffy flower. So you could use probably about five sheets. I can tell already it’s going to really be a floofy flower. But I grabbed my pipe cleaner, I’m going to grab, make sure it’s centered, twist, nice and tight! And we can cut this off, and use it right again for more flowers! Next up, I’m going to shape the flower, I’m going to do a little curve so it can look like a marigold. And again you can cut this off, but I’ll leave it for now because it helps me hold it.

04:25 - And you’ll open this up, and the hardest part, patience! We need to pull each layer slowly, careful not to rip that so that we can have our marigold. I’ll show you right here I did one side. That’s looking so nice, right um let me open this up. And I did here about five layers of tissue paper, you might want to try to stick to that. It’s just much more easier, I think. So I’m pulling those apart. Okay, last two. You kind of see the flower forming and it’s really looking nice! Okay there we have it, oh I think I am missing a layer. It looks really nice! Opening it up, okay! I’m gonna cut this off save that for another flower I might do later.

05:42 - And we have our marigolds! They’re also known as cempasuchil’s and you know like I said, we use them for the day of the dead and they’re really great additions to your altar, your ofrenda. I’m going to talk a little bit more about what we have on our altar. So for the day of dead, your altar needs to have four elements which consists of fire, which these candles will be very helpful you’ll just turn them on. And I have another one here, another candle you can get creative. Make sure to check with an adult, ideally we want to have some not real ones without any supervision.

06:21 - Those– these are great! They’ll do the job! As well, we want water that’s another element that we’ll have so we have here a jar of water that’ll be great for our altar to represent that. The papel picado is, it does represent wind, right? So we have this paper or we can create um one hanging these marigolds, you know they are great for the flowers and then also representing the wind. It’s great to just do these. And then we have earth which is food and so we have some tamales here. I do have a picture of it’s very popular the “day of the dead” bread. You can see it’s kind of shaped like skulls in a way and so this is um used to represent the day of the dead.

We eat it together, 07:09 - it’s very tasty and very delicious! So it’s also another option to have on our altar decorations. You put food of you know your member, your family member, their favorite food that they used to love. So you add some of that on there. Let me put this here. We also have salt, so the salt is used to represent– to purify the soul of the dead. and so we have some here to also add to our altar. And so we talked about you know, don’t forget the most important part! You know your family member! You want to add things they like to eat, maybe their favorite tv show, a picture of that– just their favorite things. This is focused on them, celebrating them! And we also use, you know, food and activities.

Family activities, we talk about our favorite 08:01 - memories with our family members, and you need a photo which will be– oh I have here Selena. And we’ll be doing that next with our staff where we’ll be adding, you know to our altar, stuff that we want to represent, maybe loved ones, dear ones, and we’ll be watching that next. Hi everyone my name is Brian Rivera, and I wanted to add who would represent um this is my dog, Chiquita, um she’s no longer with us, but at least by putting her here I’ll always be able to continue to remember her. Hi everyone, my name is Cynthia Bautista and I am adding a photo of my grandparents to the altar. this is my Mama Cuca and my abuelito Emilio, and i am going to add them right here.

08:58 - Hi everyone, my name is Ana Garcia Villalpando and I’m adding this little statue of El Chavo, Roberto Gomez Bolanos because he had a great part in every Mexican household. Hey everybody, I’m Sheridan. I’m adding this skull that I bought in Tijuana with my tia a few years ago. We don’t really celebrate dia de los muertos in my family, so we just started and this is kind of one of the first things that we bought, so I just want to add it here. Hi everyone, my name is Evelyn and I’ll be adding Selena Quintanilla, the queen of tejano music, to our altar. Hey everybody, thank you so much for joining us! I just wanted to say one last thing.

09:52 - Since dia de los muertos first began to be celebrated over 3000 years ago, when we practice these traditions and we keep them alive and we maintain them, we connect ourselves across space, across time to those very first roots of our culture! So with that, goodbye! Cuidense! and we’ll see you next time!.