I have some notes about The Purple Ribbon! These are mostly just loose crits and comps, not really organized cohesively :X
You draw hair well, it implies a lot of motion, and makes the page look more alive!
The blurred backgrounds are a nice touch. The blurring allows for a very simple sketch back there that doesn't take too much time, but it looks like a fleshed-out world at first glance, and keeps the focus squarely on the characters in the foreground. It's a clever shortcut that imitates real photography, but there are a few panels where the ground beneath their feet is also blurred, so it kind of spoils the illusion. Adding some sharper details in the mid-ground on the same plane as the characters would help sell it.
The cave environment in ep 1 is a little plain, before you went to the blurred backgrounds. Working with your lighting and shadows could help push your background game. References are key to good backgrounds! For painting that kind of thing I like to use a brush that imitates a palette knife. It's super easy to make, it's just a flattened box with some texture thrown on it. I like to use a tablet pen that supports barrel rotation to control the angle of the brush, but you can usually control that kind of thing from within the brush settings too. Palette knives are insanely versatile, and after painting with them I can never go back to a round brush ever again. I highly recommend making one and messing around with it! This is a couple of minutes with a knife:
Props on shooting for some more intricate perspective shots. It adds a lot of dynamism to the pages, and the variety is entertaining.
I just had a eureka moment about your comic. I realized upon reading the synopsis (after reading the first 9 episodes) that it's the dye that makes the purple ribbon special, and that changed that whole intro conversation for me. For the first 9 episodes I legitimately thought it was some kind of magic ribbon she made with seashells. Upon clarifying this, it made me also realize that your plot hinges on your audience having a certain amount of historical knowledge about how blue/purple pigments were obscenely rare until relatively recently. That's not common knowledge.
I originally wrote out this long thing about how the negotiation is for something the reader knows nothing about so there aren't any stakes, and not really any plot support, but looking back on it after realizing the thing about the dye, it seems fine. The interactions are cute, and I got kind of a feeling for who they are. They don't fall too hard into tropes from what I can tell, and they go through a range of emotions in the first chapter. The characters never explicitly talk about why the ribbon is special though, or mention that they're actually talking about the dye, not the ribbon. That's really important, since that's what the plot is about. A couple clever lines of dialog could patch that right up.
Admittedly it's still pretty long though. The negotiation scene lasts for 9 episodes. Just one of those episodes has 19 panels in it. A comic book page in traditional format caps out at around 8 panels, after that it's too dense. That means that each episode in The Purple Ribbon is almost 2.5 really dense comic pages. First, I've got to congratulate you on how much work you've gotten done, those are big numbers. That is a ton of content. But I think that's also part of what weighs down that first chapter. If we translated it into a normal comic book format, it would probably be around 23 dense pages, which is over a full issue. That's a lot for one intro scene.
I enjoy their interactions though, particularly Ellie. Ep 7 made me actually laugh out loud.