Yfadi
Traditional Costume Workshop

“Yfadi” was born as an idea at the moment when my husband, Giannis, and I wanted to make a new professional start.

The idea of engaging in weaving was born when we decided to work professionally in something we love very much, something we are closely connected to, and something we have been serving since our childhood. It is none other than our Greek tradition and, by extension, the construction of traditional costumes. The combination of love for tradition with the innate need for creation led us to study the art of weaving in depth.

We invested all our strengths, both mental and physical, as well as our interest, thought, and inner need for creation in the making of Greek traditional costumes with a lot of love and passion.

Being dancers since the age of 5, we thought there was fertile ground to delve even deeper into the tradition of our place. 

Our involvement and love for the great circle of our tradition, which includes dance, costumes, and folklore, gave us the right motivation to start the traditional costume workshop “Yfadi” in Lamia, as there was nothing similar in our city until then. 

With the aim of creating costumes-replicas that do not deviate (as much as possible) from the originals both in appearance and in the way they were made, we deemed that weaving would significantly enhance our effort, and indeed it did. 

This was also a major undertaking, as we had to produce a large number of traditional costume-replicas in order to cope. We encountered many authentic traditional costumes, many of which were handmade woven and immediately won our admiration. Some were so well-crafted and so finely woven that they did not seem handmade at all.

At this point, the idea was born within us to actively engage in weaving and the replication of handmade weavings from our tradition, while simultaneously realizing the degree of difficulty in constructing the replica costumes.

By adopting methods and techniques that were used in the past, such as traditional looms, as well as modern machines and techniques, we achieve the best possible result in terms of durability and stitching of the replicas – traditional costumes, as well as all our creations.

Since 2013, we have been weaving on our own looms, creating traditional costumes and more. The production of our textiles is directly linked to the needs and demands of our customers, and so recently, alongside traditional items, we have been crafting handmade woven home goods, handmade woven women’s accessories such as bags, shawls, and scarves. Generally, we are open to every new challenge, and thus we have chosen to create designs in collaboration with the customer for each new order, according to their personal taste and style.

Our weaving workshop has four wooden, manual looms set up differently, as each one is intended for a different use, thus trying to achieve the desired result and serve our customers as best as possible. Uniqueness, perfection, and high aesthetics are some of the elements that characterize our handmade creations.

What we strive for as a workshop is to pass on through our creations and the art of weaving the tradition of our place, our culture, and the treasure of our Greek heritage.