Purple stained vellum

In class on Friday Reggie brought small pieces of vellum that he had stained purple using the traditional brazil wood dye method. Each of us got a small piece to work on, and the choice of using either shell gold or Instacol and gold leaf. The first photo is Michelle's piece using shell gold:

This one (below) is the piece that I did using Instacoll and gold leaf. The dyeing process changes the surface of the vellum and makes it a bit unreceptive to paint. It takes a lot of manipulation to get whatever medium you are using to stay down on the vellum -- it just wants to repel the liquid. But, the final result is so beautiful! The dyed vellum looks like velvet!

Homework photos from class

Gouache, gold leaf on vellum -- Ann Rabinovitz

Dana Jacobson's homework

Gouache and gold leaf on vellum -- Peggy Kunkel

Detail of Peggy's piece

The Artist's Dilemma

Class is in two days and I am just now getting to the final of my homework project. I kept on doing "research" which means I was looking for Celtic border designs on the internet for 2 days! In the end I have run out of time to use them, so decided to leave them off, because sometimes less is more.
The dilemma: Do I forget about the homework and read a book by the pool? It is so tempting to quit and just say I'm going to work on my tan. But then, that sounds so superficial, and it will only fade, so I'm going with the homework.
Although I don't have any photos of the work in progress, I do have photos from the class I taught on gilding at conference. This is relevant, because the gilding in Reggie's class and in my projest is done with Instacoll. Here are the samples: