Mola Workshop with Isabella Tonchi

The Craft in America Center will host this workshop for Textile Arts Los Angeles.

Spend a day in community learning a traditional hand sewing technique. This is a hands-on craft and requires using a needle and thread. All materials are provided: colorful cotton fabrics, sewing needles, thread, scissors, templates.

About Isabella Tonchi

Isabella Tonchi was born in Florence, Italy, into a family of Florentine linen merchants. From an early age, she was immersed in a world of fine fabrics and handcrafted embroidery, which became her primary means of creative expression.

The originality of her work attracted the attention of the fashion world, leading her to pursue a career as a fashion designer. Throughout her career, Tonchi has been drawn more to the artistic and craft-oriented aspects of fashion than to its elitist and purely aesthetic dimensions.

While she has enjoyed a long and successful career in the fashion industry, her greatest passion remains the tactile, hands-on process of working directly with fabric. Over the past decade, she has shifted her focus toward craft and textile art, combining her extensive international experience—gained through travel and collaboration with local textile artisans—with her personal research in fabric manipulation.

Isabella learned to create Molas directly from the women who live and work on the San Blas Islands near Panama.

About Molas

For centuries, the Guna (previously known as Kuna), an Indigenous group residing in Panama and parts of neighboring Colombia, have been creating colorfully embroidered clothing. A mola, which translates to “shirt” in the Guna language, is a piece of traditional dress typically worn by women and known for its bright colors and intricate designs depicting flowers, birds, reptiles, animals and other emblems indicative of Mother Nature. The textile art began in the San Blas Islands, an archipelago off the northern coast of Panama that’s part of the Guna Yala Region, where many Guna people continue to live.”
—Britannica website

Workshop fee: $125.00 and includes all materials. Please register through Textile Arts LA.