Last term, in Natalie's history, we worked through a picture book titled
Marguerite Makes a Book. This is a beautiful story about a young girl who helps her ageing father decorate an illuminated book in the 1400's. We did a chapter a week and at the end of term tried to recreate making our own paints as Marguerite did. (Even though it was part of Natalie's curriculum, Erin did it with us too).
Like mixing any potion, pounding and mixing up the "paints" was fun. We may not have been quite as successful as Marguerite, and definitely not as skilled with our "quills", but we enjoyed ourselves.
In the book she uses parsley for green - this was definitely our best colour.
She uses dried saffron flowers for yellow. If I'd been more organised I would have been able to track down saffron, but the regular supermarket didn't have it so I supplemented with some frozen marigold flowers I had kept for dyeing - this sort of worked.
Madder root and vermillion powder were used for different reds, and these we definitely did not have so I tried paprika - this did not make red, more like a muddy brown gloop.
And Marguerite used powdered lapis lazuli for blue - I skipped blue altogether!
The parsley and marigold petals were pounded in the mortar and pestle and then mixed with egg white, as Marguerite did. Then we cut some feathers into quills and attempted to decorate our names - this was more difficult than expected, it's quite a skill to get the paint/gloop onto your "quill" and then to be able to put it where you want it to be on the paper!
Here are our final pieces.
