Did you know?

The ancient Egyptians had penicillin. They used mouldy bread as a treatment for wounds.

Making reinforced concrete foundations

Just in case you wanted to know how they do it...
The concrete goes all the way up to the top of the red crane thing, and then all the way down!

Paper is not dead

Best viewed full screen.

Banana Matzo

OK, I don't really think I need to give a recipe for this. Except that you should butter the Matzo so the banana doesn't fall off.

Alizarin

Hope you're not yet bored of purple dyes...
I have just discovered that Alizarin comes from the Madder plant - which is what Thyatiran 'Purple' was made from.

It's a bit too red in the photo.

Alizarin Crimson paint is actually now often made from Quinacridone, which is more lightfast, but has nothing like as nice a name. Nor as nice a colour.

Natural pigments

Here's a very interesting set of posts on making paint from natural materials.

One of the colours she used was madder, which is particularly interesting in the light of my previous post about purple. In Thyatira, purple was made from the madder plant, not shellfish. This means it would be even redder than most ancient purple. 

Interesting conundrum for illustrating: do I make Lydia's 'purple' completely historically accurate, therefore not actually what we would call purple at all? Or do I make it closer to what we would call purple - not being strictly accurate, but going as red as possible while still being purple to our eyes?

I think I would lean to the latter for illustrations to be used while telling a story. It has to make sense, and it's enough to have to stop and explain to the children that purple clothes were very expensive in those days, without trying to explain that they also weren't actually purple at all... In an information-type book, however, you could give more of an explanation. 

Sometimes you need to use a wee bit of artists' license.

Purple

These are the colours in my palette that I would consider to be purples:

 Particularly, these types of colours: 

c60 m60 y0 k0;   c60 m80 y0 k0;   c50 m90 y0 k0;   c40 m100 y0 k0

Purple is actually a tricky colour to show on screen.

For paint, I would consider dioxazine violet to be a very typical purple (mauve too, to a certain extent).

However, in ancient times, purple was a bit different.
It could vary too, but was closer to this:

r102 g2 b60 (approx c52 m99 y81 k7)

I've just added this to my palette. I have others that would work well too - but only the last one was in my original 'purple' chart:

c22 m100 y40 k46;   c15 m100 y40 k35;   c20 m100 y30 k15