Isabel Nestora Bringas

Isabel Nestora Bringas (born 1934, Taos, New Mexico) was born and raised in the house that her parents built in Taos in 1920. As a child she loved playing in her uncle's cornfield next door and learning to sew on her grandmother's old Singer treadle sewing machine. While in high school Nestora lived with her older sister, Guadalupe "Lupita," in Albuquerque, where she subsequently attended the University of New Mexico and met "the love of [her] life." She raised her brood of fifteen children while living in Gary, Indiana, and the Chicago suburbs, during which years she worked as a seamstress primarily doing alterations. Nestora learned to take apart, alter, and then return to pristine form the finely-tailored clothing of her customers; this, in turn, exponentially improved her sewing skills. In 1998, after nearly four decades in the midwest, Nestora returned to live full-time in Taos. Not only did she reunite with her childhood friend and next door neighbor, Joan, but in 2000 she joined the "Taoseñas," a social group that originally formed in the early 1930s with the aim of encouraging local Spanish-speaking women to practice their English language skills. Nestora was introduced to colcha embroidery at Taoseñas gatherings. This quickly led to her developing a passion for using the colcha stitch to embroider onto items such as her custom-made and custom-tailored suits and onto purses and shawls of her own design. Frequent motifs are sunflowers, butterflies, and hummingbirds. Nestora's pride and joy is the altar cloth she and five other women made that is on permanent display at Martinez Hacienda, Taos. Each of the six women completed an identically designed pattern of flowers embroidered in primary colors such as red and blue on an off-white linen and silk background fabric. Nestora joined the six pieces together and created a backing for the altar cloth. Nestora is an active member of a colcha embroidery group that meets monthly at Martinez Hacienda to socialize and stitch together. She finds colcha embroidery to be relaxing and meditative. Nestora refers to colcha embroidery as "chicken soup for the soul." 

(photo by Rebecca Abrams, October, 2020)