mélimélo molas

Now if you read my post about "where I'm from" you'll recall that I was born and raised in Panama. When we lived there my parents started a collection of molas which were always on display in our home. My parent's housewarming gift when I moved into my first apartment in Paris were 6 autographed black and white prints of paintings of the Canal Zone done by Al Sprague, our Canal Zone neighbor and a fantastic artist. So really the art of Panama has followed me since childhood.

So it won't come as a big surprise that I would have chosen to theme our bedroom with this and other Panamanian art...

Now, you may be wondering what exactly is a mola? I like to describe them like drawings I did as a kid where you covered a sheet of paper with lots of colors, and then covered the whole thing up in black (using crayons). Then with a needle you would etch your drawing into the black and the colors would come through from underneath. Now surfing the net I found a site that is dedicated to molas and the "molagirl's" explanation is most probably a bit better than mine. Her website also offers plenty of information on the Kuna Indians who make them and the San Blas Islands off the coast of Panama where they live.

Now I've had this project on my radar for a while, and I'm so happy I finally got to it. It all started with a Christmas gift: a new printer! Such a cool gift... did not see that one coming!!

This new baby is a little bit deeper than our previous printer, and so I embarked on a mission to rearrange our desk space. Purging, reorganizing, streamlining, rethinking the space to best suit our needs, and hopefully getting rid of some of the clutter. So by the end of the day, the desk looked like this:

 

I was pretty happy with the result, but it looked like a bare canvas crying out to be played with....and so I did! 

And thanks to our new printer I was able to print out some cool detail photographs of molas 

to embellish some of the elements on our desk.

I chose mola details rather than a full mola as I felt the graphic look would be visually stronger, and I think that was the right choice. I cut the rectangles to fit the front of the drawers - the tricky part being to cut out the U shape slot!

And then thanks to Mod Podge I varnished them onto the drawers for a nice glossy effect. 

I am really quite happy with the end result!

To tie in the two magazine holders in which I'm holding the "To Do" admin and other clutter I haven't yet sorted out,

I cut out two more designs and using the same technique dressed them up too!

And here you have the end result:

Just for fun, I decided to change our computer background to a mola visual, which really gives the whole desk and brand new look!

Quite amazing what a little color, a printer and some glue can do!

Here's one more side by side before & after shots:

If you're interested in seeing what Al Sprague does, you can check out his website here!

I'm curious to know, had you heard about molas before?