Adinkra, Good-Bye Cloth

Fabric designers in Ghana carve stamp designs from calabash squashes. they dip the stamp in shiny black dye made from tree bark and press it on cloth strips. originally Ghanaians wore clothes made from this fabric when they were attending a funeral or when they were leaving somebody's village. Ghanaians called the dye adinkra, which means good-bye. People now call the stamped fabric Adinkra cloth, and they use white and colored material not just black or brown that was used long ago. The cloth is hung on the walls, used for tableclothes, and sewn into clothing.

These are some of the designs that would have been carved into the calabash squash.

Here are some examples of Adinkra cloth.

Second graders edited stamps in Kid Pix to create traditional symbols