Traditional adire eleko cloth is created by hand-painting cassava paste onto white fabric before immersing it in indigo. This textile reveals an innovation in this tradition, in which Yoruba textile artists use tin stencils to apply the cassava paste. This allows them to work more rapidly and use motifs in a variety of configurations.
The West African fermentation vat uses crushed and composed leaves from the Yoruba Indigo plant to create the dye. Materials such as ash lye or burnt coconut fibers, millet stalks, or even indigo branches are added to the vat to enhance alkalinity and activate the dye vat. In Yorubaland, dyers use stacked clay pots and a mesh of twigs and leaves to filter wood ash balls with water to prepare the lye ash.