this vase is really a lot of work! ... and it is just eating up the gold! i would guesstimate that when it is finished, it will have at least 3.5 to 4 kilos of gold on it!... or at least that is what i will have gone through. however, i think that i will finish in just a few days, so i am closing in on this one!

i seem to be in a gold frenzy... perhaps it is addictive... but it seems that most of my work this year has been with gold... and there is more to come...

i was not sure how the curve on the outside of the top of the vase would be dealt with. after doing one section (as seen in the first pic... the vase is upside down), and because of the thickness of the gold, i realized that i would have to use smaller pieces to get the interstices more uniform... you can see from the pic that the grout line would have been too wide, and therefore distracting... so i had to take a different route (which can be seen in the second pic, in which the vase is right-side up).