The Kuna Indians of Panama make beautiful designs in fabric by layering and cutting away the cloth to reveal the colors underneath. These fabric designs, called “molas,” were traditionally sewn into blouses, but have now gained worldwide recognition as a unique art form.
In addition to showing the students photographs of molas, a parent who had traveled to Panama graciously shared her collection of molas with us during this unit.
Middle school students created colorful paper molas by using X-acto knives to cut away layers of construction paper. They first assembled a stack of different colors of paper, gluing the stack together on the very top edge of each sheet. They worked out a design on a piece of white paper, and colored it in with markers that matched the colors in their packet of papers.
They taped this sheet to the top of their packet, and carefully cut away layers to reveal each color for their design. If red, for example, was the color that they wanted to reveal, they inserted a piece of matboard in their packet on TOP of that color to avoid cutting through it!
