Weaving has accompanied him since childhood. When he was one year old, his father died and his mother was left alone with eight children. To ensure additional income for the family, after Christmas each year she would pull out the loom and weave carpets for sale until Easter. She used various patterns – Tatras, rakes, butterflies, stripes, or cabbage heads. Already then, while handing over the bobbins, indelible images of beautifully stretched colored threads and the regular sound of the loom were inscribed into young Metod’s soul.

In the seventh grade of elementary school, he sewed his first pair of trousers. A friend who was learning to be a tailor helped with the pattern. Success encouraged him and he subsequently began sewing clothing for the whole family and on commission. After marriage, he bought a sewing machine and further intensified production. He sewed children’s items, trousers, shirts, blouses, jackets, and even wedding dresses. He created costumes for his children and later also dressed the members of the folk group Lúčan in costumes he made.

Alongside sewing, since 1985 he has been involved in embroidery based on patterns from Slovak magazines, where his own patterns were later published. He mainly embroidered tablecloths and combined the embroidery techniques of richelieu and kalocsai. He has been actively producing since 2000. In 2004, he lost his job at the railway, and that’s when he decided to try to make a living with his own hands. He set up the loom he inherited from his mother and started weaving. He got the hang of it quickly and then, according to his own words, it started to flow naturally. He first mastered plain weave and carpet weaving, as was the custom in Lúčkach. However, at the festival in Východná, he was captivated by the openwork patterns of the master of folk art production, Mária Tomisová.

His products soon caught the attention of ethnologist Iveta Zuskinová from the Liptovské múzeum in Ružomberok, who recommended that he contact the artist of the Center for Folk Art Production (ÚĽUV), Janka Menkynová. In 2005, the artistic committee of ÚĽUV approved his collection of openwork coverlets, igniting his collaboration with ÚĽUV, further developing in a creative dialogue with another artist of ÚĽUV, Eva Bachratá. In addition to openwork weaving, over time he also included other weaving techniques – rep weave and canvas weave, placing him among versatile weavers. As a result, in 2012, he had to switch to looms with four shafts from the old two-shaft looms.

Over the years, people have become accustomed at fairs and craft events to see a man sitting at the loom. After all, in traditional culture, craftsmanship weaving was primarily done by men, while women mainly engaged in this work within household production. However, it was the women who passed on weaving in his family. His mother learned to weave from her own mother, and he now leads his two daughters to weaving.

He uses cotton and linen for production, and he even grows flax on a small plot in his garden to have material for demonstrating the processing steps during the performances of the Lúčan folk group.

Source: Mikolaj, Tomáš: Masters of the New Millennium [online]. Bratislava: Center for Folk Art Production, 2020 [accessed on May 29, 2024]. Available at: https://uluv.sk/kniznica/digitalna-kniznica/

For his activities in the field of weaving, he was awarded the title of Master of Folk Art Production in 2015.