Creativity fueled by chica power

Kathy Cano Murillo’s early crafts life was a bust. In school, she felt like an artist, she says, but teachers didn’t seem to appreciate her creative spark. She got a C in a high school crafts class, and even that didn’t dampen her drive. In fact, she crafted more furiously than before, working from home and giving away her painted magnets and beaded bracelets to the delight of most who received them (except when the paint came off and ruined their clothes).

Murillo practiced, persisted and eventually excelled. She became an expert “crafty chica,” the author of a nationally syndicated crafts column and of a growing number of books as inspirational and intimate as they are instructive and easy to understand.

In this newest volume, she projects the joy of crafting, and of life itself, in a variety of vibrant, brilliantly colored make-it-yourself items that include jewelry, small trinket-laden tables, luminarias and an oilcloth-covered chest.

She invokes the power of large, loving families, of prayer and saint cards, of mementos stashed in the back of grandma’s closet.

You do not need to be a Latina, or even a hands-on type of guy or girl, to enjoy this contagiously craftsy book.

-- Bettijane Levine