Adire

Adire is a resist-dyed indigo cloth made by Yoruba women in southwestern Nigeria, patterned by keeping dye from reaching parts of the cloth. The resist is worked three ways: adire oniko ties raffia around seeds or pebbles to reserve small white rings, adire alabere stitches raffia into the cloth in lines, and adire eleko paints or stencils designs in cassava-starch paste before the cloth goes into the indigo. The blue comes from a fermented indigo vat, and a deep adire may be dipped twenty-five times or more toward a blue-black. Indigo resist-dyeing is ancient in West Africa, the oldest surviving example a cap from the Dogon region of Mali dated to the eleventh century, but adire as a named Yoruba tradition flourished in the early twentieth century, when imported cotton shirting reached towns like Abeokuta and Ibadan and the carved-calabash and metal-stencil methods spread.