Madder the Color of the Paleolithic Age

When it comes to fiber it's hard to be fixated on one color or one color scheme, there are so many fascinating colors. As I chose a harmonizing palette I like to mull over the origins of the pigment. And talk about what is in the stash. I've been reading in Selvedge Magazine about kelsch fabrics of a hundred years ago and how either the natural linen color or woad for blue and Rubia tinctorum, the roots of the madder plan was used for these fabrics. Which sounds quite old., but in fact madder as a dye stuff  is much older. Madder was a color of Paleolithic times...the Stone Age....which began about 250,000 years BC and ended closer to 10,000 years BC with it's first phase...later phases of the Stone Age Came. And our Stone Age artistic fore-bearers used a bit of the red tones to embellish their works . Some of the 'colorful' history of the dyestuffs that made up madder can be found on the web. Some of the madder colors I've been working with now include: Jadite yarn 533 and a few others. In fact I can't help but seize any skein I see, in case the perfect project hits. 

Fierce Fibers

I've loved the "yarns of transformation" logo of Alchemy, and hae made many a flowering concoction of beads and knitted balls, and trinkets just to be able to grasp the concept of art and magic that their subtle dying conveys. And bamboo ,pine, silk, jadite and steel have intrigued me from other spinners of fine threads, just to give you some examples of my favorites. And as I read the lore of whitches brews, love potions and the fircests of treatments for fevers: like the henbane and wolf's bane. If I could weave just a few fibers into some flax as tribute to the women before us, it would be quite something.