Seasons of Lace

We interrupt the awards ceremony to invite you vote for the Viewers Choice nominees.

You can enter your vote in this poll only once, and only if you’re logged into the Seasons of Lace Blog.

The pictures you see here are shown in random order.  If you’d like to see them in a different order, just re-load the page!  We’ve included the pictures in the size that the knitters provided — if we could, we’d resize them all so that they were a uniform size, but alas, we don’t have enough time to get that done and still get the poll out this month!  To see more images of each one… click on the picture itself to go to the full post.

So… take a look, choose your favorite by clicking on it’s button…. and then scroll down to the bottom and click the vote button.  Remember… you only get one vote!… so you can’t change your mind later.

You’ve got until Friday, November 7th at 12:00 midnight Central Standard Time (US) to place your vote.

p.s. You have to login to be able to vote.

Today we look at the Nominees for Lace Extravaganza (10 nominees).

Our Judges had more of a challenge with this category than with the prior two, as there were more than twice as many entries! Once again, I’ve selected what I perceive to be the key photos from the posts, and once again, I’ve linked to each post by title so you can check out the rest of the pictures the author originally listed. The nominees are, in the order in which they were first posted to the Seasons of Lace blog:

Continue Reading »

We interrupt this raffle fest to bring you the first round of Gold Medal Winners of our Judged Competitions.

You, our members, nominated various posts for the Judged Competitions.  We collected them, and set up screenings for each group, and invited our illustrious judges to go take a look.

Before we reveal their choices, let me introduce our judges to you.

In no particular order, I bring you Joe

He writes the blog Queer Joe’s Knitting Blog, where he generally has great pictures, and lots of lovely knitting.  Lately, he’s been “swatching” for a sweater — by knitting a wonderful  hat.  How he thinks he’ll get away without publishing the pattern for that hat is beyond me…. perhaps he’s already realized the truth.

To be sure we have serious LACE experience on the panel, we invited Miriam Felton.

Her lace patterns appear in places like Interweave Knits, Knitty, in her own books, and on my needles.  But despite such fame, she’s really a very charming person, who was delighted to help us with this competition.

And last, but by no means least, Jared Flood.

He writes the blog Brooklyn Tweed, designs great patterns, and takes awesome pictures.  His blog is worth subscribing to even if you don’t read a word, the pictures are so consistently good.  Of course, if you choose that option, you’ll be missing out on some good stuff… but hey, it’s your choice.

These three wonderful knitters generously agreed to look at all our nominated pictures, and to send me their top three choices for each category.  I had a go at the task myself, just to see what I was asking.  This was no easy walk through the park, let me tell you.  You’ll get to see for yourselves when it’s time to vote on the Viewers’ Choice Award.

A quick note — each of these contestants received multiple nominations (as is true pretty much through out these competitions).  We didn’t really keep track of how many times any given post was nominated, since we wanted the Judges to choose the winners, and didn’t want to weight anyone’s decision based on the number of nominations a given post received.  This also means that, though several posts were self-nominated, most self-nominated posts had “seconds” to their nominations.

But best of all…  it’s quite clear that the competition was close — there was only one category in which the first place choice was unanimous!

But enough of this background stuff, eh?  You want to hear who won… I know you do.  I’ll be doing this in several posts, so that I can have actual pictures for you to see, instead of just a bunch of links.

Continue Reading »

I was a winner in one of the Random Joy raffle drawings.   My prize was to select two patterns from Melanie at Pink Lemon Twist. 

I’ve been eyeing a few of her patterns since I began (and have yet to finish!) my Swan Lake stole (Mystery Stole 2).

I chose Leda’s Dream (the Original Mystery Stole) and Scheherazade (Mystery Stole 2).

I love all of Melanie’s work and had a hard time deciding! 

Thank you!

Here are pics of my cardigan almost halfway. The yarn is Blue Heron Egyptian Mercerized Cotton, 2-ply laceweight, colorway Carnelian. I finally figured out how I can play with my photos, and have managed to give a sense of the real color of the yarn in the top, detail photo. The lower photo shows the effect of the flash–it hides the blue tones, making the whole thing seem orangey. Well there is a lot of orange in the yarn, but it’s quite subtle.This is a fun knit, coinciding with my second mandala shawl. I’m hoping to finish both before the winter of lace comes along, so I can make a fresh start!

I got my fabulous raffle prize in the mail. It’s a Knit Picks Lace yarn sampler. Thanks!

!

And you thought we were done….’

But I still have more yarn to give away!

For example… there are three skeins of Malabrigo lace, just aching for a new home.

Our very own Darla donated this prize, and we’re awarding it now as the Second Round Raffle Prize for Medium Lace.  The lucky winner is …. hilltopkatie!  And she’ll also be receiving a Shawls Booklet from JoyKnits.

in addition, I have this yummy Yarn and pattern combo from Stitch Jones

This is harder still, since I can touch it and everything.  Even so, I’ll be sending it off to the winner of our  Socks Category Round Two Raffle,along with a pattern for Angel Wings socks from JoyKnits The winner is….. vicki!

And finally … for round two anyway… There is this lovely hand dyed merino from our own Vicki (vicki953)

I’ve got to tell you, sending this away — like to kill me!  But even so, it’s been awarded as the second round prize in the Beaded Lace category, so I’ll  be sending it along to bagoyarn, who will enjoy choosing patterns from

KnitSpot as well, since she wins the last of the $10.00 gift certificates.

I hope you all had a great weekend while I was frolicking about with my family on a bit of a sneak long weekend.

It’s great to see these prize winners posts of their goodies — especially the ones that I haven’t seen in person yet.

Meanwhile, we have the voting in from all but one of our judges, so I’m hoping that we can announce Judged Competition winners soon.

In the interim…I think it’s about time for Round Two of the Raffles, except that I do want to explain how we’re doing this, because not all of the events will have multiple rounds of prizes. You may have noticed that for each of the first round raffles, I identified how many “entries” there were (posts that qualified as entries either designated that something was cast on, or finished), and how many knitters there were. We decided that for categories with fewer than ten players, we’d do a single raffle; for those with between 10 and 17 players, we’d run two rounds of raffles; for those with 18- 25 players we’d do three rounds, and the one with over 30 players would get a fourth raffle. We considered doing 1-10, 11-20, 21-30, and 30+, but one category with 18 knitters had over 50 entries… and we just “had” to reward that.

So, for Round Two, we have some duplicate prizes, sort of.  The second round Raffle Prize For Newbie Lace Knitters, and for Small Lace is a KnitPicks Lace sampler.   We have two colors left — and our winners will get to choose!  There’s one sampler pack in “Sea View” (blues), and two in “Sunset Picnic”.  Whichever winner contacts me first gets first choice.

And our Newbie prize winner is……… Melfina!! who will also be enjoying a $10.00 gift certificate from

And our Small Lace prize winner is ……. nolaboard!, who will also be receiving a Hearts & Hugs sock pattern from JoyKnits

Congratulations!

But wait… that’s not all!!!

We also have another gorgeous shawl pin  from Designs by Romi to raffle off for the Second Round prize in Self Designed Lace!

thislittlepiggyknits will be receiving this pin as soon as Romi can arrange it!  She’ll also be receiving a sock pattern from the Knit Foundry

And finally ( … well, for today anyway)

We’ve raffled off another $25.00 Gift certificate from

as the Second Round Raffle Prize for Wee Lace

alittlefuzzy will be receiving this… and will enjoy free shipping on her goodies if she’s in the U.S.!  She also has a $10.00 gift certificate from KnitSpot

Tomorrow??

More Round Two Raffle Prizes!!!

I received my prize package from Woolgirl today :)  Jen generously let me pick out a pattern and a skien of yarn from her shop and this is what I chose:

Of course, I picked a sock pattern and then some wonderful merino/tencel blend yarn. Now I have to finish up my gift knitting so I can cast on my new pattern.  Thanks Jen at Woolgirl!

My Newbie Lace Knitter prize arrived this week!  It’s the DVD “Knitting Lace with Meg Swansen”.  I haven’t had time to watch it yet, but I did look at the charts.  I really like the neck-scarf version of a Faroese shawl, and I think that will probably be my first project from the DVD.

I have also joined a KAL on Ravelry.  We are going to be making the Fan Stitch Half Circle Shawl from Martha Waterman’s Traditional Knitted Lace Shawls.  I still need to find yarn for the project.  So I fully intend to continue my lace knitting efforts, and I look forward to joining you all again for “Winter of Lace”.  And to the moderators, thank you again for this wonderful KAL!