Rita Mary Holt's white hair often sparkled with glitter.
Her husband got used to sequins in his cereal.
The family dog sometimes resembled a glitter-glue project.
It was all fallout from the chaos of making hundreds of costumes for her daughter's ballet productions in the Richmond Department of Recreation and Parks City Dance Program.
Mrs. Holt, who served as head costume maker to City Dance from 1979 to 1999, died in her daughter's arms Wednesday after suffering an apparent heart attack at home.
A memorial service for the 95-year-old Richmond resident will be held Tuesday at 11 a.m. at Emmanuel Episcopal Church, 1214 Wilmer Ave.
"Sewing. It all sounds so silly," she said in a 1988 Richmond Times-Dispatch interview. "I wouldn't call myself a seamstress. More of a buffer-upper."
At the time, she had spent four months buffer-upping 300 costumes for the Richmond Department of Recreation and Parks' staging of the ballet "Cinderella" under the direction of her daughter, Annette Holt, now director of City Dance and co-director of City Dance Theatre.
"I made 64 pairs of wings for this show," Mrs. Holt said at the time. "We have pink fairies, white fairies, blue fairies and yellow fairies."
Kilgore "Bill" Eldridge, president of Friends of City Dance, noted that "there are about 1,800 alums of the City Dance Program, and probably 1,200 consider her their honorary grandmother."
Mrs. Holt, who learned to sew from her mother in her native Wembley, England, would receive her assignment to make show costumes "and bring 20 African-American moms together and have a sewing party that would last into the wee hours," Eldridge said.
She sewed less and less as arthritis in her hands began to slow her down. After 1999, she continued to work on headpieces and did small alterations. Her hands hurt so much five years ago that she had to stop.
"She was remarkable, gallant, witty, brave and very modest," said her daughter, her only immediate survivor.
A former competitive woman's golfer in England, she was a World War II Red Cross nurse in London during the German bombing. At the end of the war she met Lt. Edward Holt, an American Army Air Forces intelligence officer, whom she married in New Mexico. He died in 1994.
She went on fossil-finding expeditions with her biologist-paleontologist-teacher husband at first and then was an Air Force wife after her husband was recalled to active duty. After he retired, they lived in London before moving to Baltimore, where her daughter joined them.
Mrs. Holt sewed costumes for a cultural-arts program in Baltimore that her daughter was involved with before moving to Richmond.
"She attended every performance, every recital I ever did," her daughter said. "The last was 'Amahl [and the Night Visitors'] last Christmas."
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