I've always been the creative type and used to draw a lot when I was a kid. In middle school, I decided I wanted to be an architect (plus assessment tests pointed that way too). Long story short, I graduated with a degree in Architecture but did not pursue it because I realized I had more fun drawing construction documents than designing buildings. One of the design tools I learned how to use while in university was Adobe Illustrator. Fast forward to 2014, I got a paper-cutting machine just for fun, a Black Friday deal that I couldn't say no to. 

What inspired me to start making paper molas was looking for something special to give to a few of my closest friends. Since I couldn’t find anything, I decided to make it instead. I remembered my love for molas and thought it would be a great way to show a small part of my Panamanian culture. For those who don't know, a mola is a textile art form of the Guna Indians, an indigenous group from the San Blas Islands in Panama and a few small villages in Colombia (here’s a link to a great article from the Smithsonian Magazine that shows real molas and explains in more detail: https://bit.ly/3EZw8kl). Being such a skillful art and my lack of the proper sewing technique, I chose to make them out of color cardstock. I drew them on the computer, then cut them with my new machine, and glued the cut cardstock on top of each other on canvas painted in black, inspired by the molas layering technique, or as it’s known in the quilting world, “reverse appliqué”. 

In the end, my friends loved their gifts and said that I could make these to sell and encouraged me to do so.  So in 2016, I participated in my first craft fair at the start of the holiday season and had other paper molas designs on canvas, as well as handmade cards. However, after a couple of years, I decided to stop making them out of cardstock because there wasn’t enough demand and they took a long time to make. So I now only print them, not only on paper, but also on artboards, coasters, magnets, etc., using a technique called sublimation. I also started cutting the designs on thin sheets of wood using a laser cutter and toyed with the idea of making them out of paper again. Stay tuned for those.