Responsible Rhino's Tapa Designs

Malo e lelei friends and family

To celebrate Tongan Language Week, the school had a school wide task. The task was to complete a Tongan Tapa Cloth.

The Responsible Rhinos found this a little tricky but by completing a draft and being exposed to many examples of Tongan Tapa designs and patterns we were able to understand what the final product should look like.

We decided on four main patterns, two basic and two tricky patterns.
Half of the class worked on the tricky designs and the other half on the basic designs.

We used black crayons to go over the patterned lines and then we used the colours brown or yellow to colour any parts we think needed colouring. After that we dyed our patterns in brown dye, this was a little tricky as some children dyed their paper one too many times causing it to become really wet and making it easy to tear. Nonetheless, we got to the final product in the end, we waited for the patterns to dry overnight. The next day we crunched the patterns up to give it the rustic look and then we
pasted it on a bigger paper.

Here are some photos of our tapa designs and our final product.