One of God's greatest gift to me is giving me the desire of making things. I woke up this morning at 4.30 am with an overwhelming feeling of gratitude traveling all over my body. Gratitude for having the desire and ability to create.

It is hard to explain, I have this feeling very often and I believe is what makes me a happy person overall and keeps me moving and dancing everyday. Then, I remembered what Kirsten Rickert said in her blog one time; ''Art is known to increase moral, reduce stress and keep people occupied. People find peace, contentment and rewards in arts & crafts. The arts and crafts foster skills and savors time. Enough said.''

People often comment: oh, but you can do it because you are so creative. It is not true, first of all we are all artists and we can all do things, what makes people thing I am creative is because I have this need to create things.

When do I find time to do it? If you ask me I will answer, I don't know. With time I just learned that there's time for everything, and trust me, if you are as busy as you can be you'll even have more time to do things. Keep yourselves busy, it plays the trick!

Well, this Christmas, I bought a few presents, but as usual I made the rest by hand. It is my love language and that's the best way I know to show my love and thankfulness for people that are part of my life.

New born gift set

This is the gift I put together for my little God daughter who was born at the beginning of December. I made the reversible cape (the same I made for the tutorial for the Wild and Free January bundle). I used a light gray velvet fabric for one of the sides and a light pink for the other side and tied with the gorgeous hand-dyed silk velvet ribbon.

I also got her a pair of Freshly Picked moccasins in the Blush color. And the hand-knitted pixie hat from Typically Red, you can follow her work in Instagram here. This talented mom is raising three girls in Australia in the fresh country air one hour south from Sydney. I just discovered her blog the other day and I love it. It just makes me want to travel all the way to Australia and snuggle with her in the couch knitting. Well, hoping that she would teach me how to knit, because I haven't gotten there yet.

Note: I got everything as if it was for a one year old, since when they are newborns they grow fast and sometimes parents don't even have time to put them everything they bought or they got as a present. Everything is huge on baby Mary right now, but I can't wait for her to start wearing these.

Paintings

I made these 2 sets of 2 paintings for my friends. I don't consider myself a painter, but I do like to paint once in a while. This was a recreation of two projects I did for my Design I class in college this last quarter. The teacher kept the originals that I did for class, because she loved them so I painted them in two square canvases.

About three years ago, my friend Veronica Algaba and I painted a 8 m x 3m wall after 15 days and 380 intense hours. This was a crazy intense project that we finished exactly 3 days before I came here in the US to be an Aupair. After that experience, it took me about a year to paint something again. You can check out Veronica's post in her blog about this project we did on September 2011.

Weaving with kids

This was my first attempt to weave. I've been following amazing weavers in Instagram like Warped Threads among others, that inspired me to make one together with the boys for my host family this Christmas. I bought the loom online here. I looked different tutorials in Internet and also the wonderful tutorials of the blog A Beautiful Mess.

It is far from perfect, but we learned a lot and the kids loved helping with the process.