Adire Alabere

The Yoruba have many ways of applying the indigo into their cloths and one of them is the stitched resist method.The Yoruba term for it is adire alabere. To begin the cloths are sometimes folded or pleated and sometimes not. Next they are stitched with a design and then they are dipped in indigo bath, dried and finally the stitching is removed with razor blades to show feather edged designs that can get quite complex. As in this example,one can see remnants of the stitching threads all over the cloth.