Mudcloth, or Bogalon as it is known in French-speaking countries, is a hand-woven and hand-painted traditional textile craft originating in the Sahel region on West Africa. It is called "mudcloth" because of the use of natural pigments used in the painting process.
Traditional looms are used to weave thin strips of fabric that are then sewn together to create one large piece of cloth. The cloth is then ready to be dyed and painted. Various pigments are made from infusions of local leaves, roots, bark, and of course, mud.

The plain cotton cloth is first soaked in an infusion of Acacia leaves to create the characteristic yellow background color. Then a variety of other natural dyes are used to paint on the cloth. The white tones are produced by using local soap to wash away the previous colors and expose the natural cotton underneath.

Traditionally, mudcloth is decorated with many geometric designs, and rich earth-toned colors. Artisans of Western Africa have been producing this beautiful fabric for hundreds of years. The artisan we work with first learned this technique from his grandmother in his ancestral village in rural Mali. Hunger forced him to leave his village in the 80's and travel all around West Africa in search of work for a number of years. He was finally able to make a home in Burkina Faso, where he has been creating original, hand-painted mudcloth designs for the last nineteen years.