Our guest artist/author today is Nada Vukadinovic also know as Halay on the Felting and Fiber Forum.  She has generously offered to share her workshop experience learning a Fiber Inlay Technique.

A few weeks ago I attended a workshop in Maribor, Slovenia, given by internationally renowned textile artist and felter, Vilte Kazlauskaite from Lithuania. Her work is fabulous. You can see her creations here: http://vilte.tumblr.com/

She held three workshops, but I was able to attend only one. It was called Fiber Inlay Technique. Quite intriguing, I had no clue what this could mean and I was very excited to learn about it.  I attended only one afternoon workshop. On  the previous day attendants learned something about  fabric manipulation in nuno felt, and the last day was devoted to the creation of a vest.

We were working with two types of silk: ponge and chiffon and were expected to create a piece of work, either a shawl or something similar, a flat piece anyway. I decided to make a square piece which I will probably use for a cushion.

First we were asked to draw a pattern on a piece of paper in the form of a mosaic that we would like to appear on the finished work, e.g. a bird, or something abstract.

I decided to draw something simple.

We used different sorts of fiber (mulberry silk, viscose, bamboo, and flax.)

When we were finished laying out fabric and fibers we began rolling and rolling. When we noticed that the wool has penetrated through all the layers of silk, we started kneading the piece and then rolled the project without the rod. The shrinkage percent was from 40-50%.

This is what we got in the end:

 

Unfortunately, we were working only with white silk and some blue and white fibers, but I imagine it would be interesting to play with different colours, especially different colour fibers.  The fiber I personally used for the first time was flax and  fell in love with it.   I am already planning  to buy some and dye it.

 

To put fiber inlay technique in a nutshell, it means lots of silk and different fibers. Here are some more photos showing Vilte’s work: beautiful textures.

And here is some yummy hand dyed silk.

 

Vilte uses natural dyes only.

It was nice to learn something new. Here in Slovenia we don’t have many opportunities for learning new felting techniques, but the situation seems to be improving. We are planning to invite another master from Ukraine and are getting quite excited about it.

Thank you Nada for sharing this exciting technique with us!