Adire

The earliest pieces of this type were probably simple tied designs on cotton cloth, handspun and woven locally (rather like those still produced in Mali), but in the early decades of the 20th century new access to large quantities of imported shirting material via the spread of European textile merchants in Abeokuta and other Yoruba towns caused a boom in these women’s entrepreneurial and artistic efforts, making adire a major local craft in Abeokuta and Ibadan, attracting buyers from all over West Africa. Abeokuta is considered to be the capital of adire.making in Nigeria;[3] however, some suggest that the large cities of Ibadan and Osogbo (Yorubaland) are more important in adire-making because adire dyeing began in Abeokuta when Egba women from Ibadan returned with this knowledge.[4] The cloth’s basic shape became that of two pieces of shirting material stitched together to create a woman’s wrapper cloth.[5] New techniques of resist dyeing developed.