Did this using silk fabric. Silk was very light, easily wetted out, and pretty easy to cut once tacky. It also took the color very well when dying.
For some reason, I’m not able to post a reply so just gonna respond on the original post. Done quite a few inlays with various fabrics and the silk used for this was the best. My wife was doing some amazing mandala style tye dye on silk an wanted it inlayed on her board. The silk came in various lengths and widths. This particular one was 9’x3’ but they come in other smaller and larger sizes. She used the lightest weight silk which was similar in thickness to the material used in a parachute but maybe a bit lighter/thinner. She used professional dyes, not Rit. They come in powder form and you mix with water in your squirt bottle to apply to the cloth. I have no idea how she tied her cloth, she did use a lot of rubber bands. She learned all her tying methods from the net. When she was doing them every day she was producing some amazing patterns. The silk seemed to really absorb the color resulting in such vivid contrasts. My crappy picture doesn’t do it justice. As far as applying to the board it was just a typical inlay. Lam the bottom with a cut-lap, tape off the cut-lap and lay the silk over the board lined up with the pattern the best I could, apply resin and lam. The silk was easily saturated and much more transparent than other materials I have used. Once it started to get tacky I cut the silk along the cut-lap. Silk is strong stuff so it was tricky to cut because it wanted to just push into the foam rather than cut with a razor blade. I did not want to wait too long to cut for fear that it would be too difficult to cut. As I cut it, because it is so thin in some places it would crinkle up getting air underneath, but since it was still tacky I could use the razor like a squeegee and flatten it all out again. It required minimal resin to wet out cutting down on weight while seemed to strengthen the deck pretty significantly. One thing I noticed about silk is because it is so thin you can see the foam underneath, If you used more earthy tones in your dyes they would blend in with the natural yellowing of the blank with age and be timeless, whereas colors, like used in the picture pop with the white foam underneath but lost a little bit of the pop as the board aged (after 1-2 years of constant use)