And the Winners Are….

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.

First up … with the fewest contestants (a thing for which we are grateful, actually, given the category) … we have

Lace Disasters

To see the collection of the complete posts for this entry, follow this link.  It will open in a new tab or window, so you won’t lose your place here.  You can also go directly to any image’s full post by clicking on the post title that shows below the pictures.  For this contest in particular, the image doesn’t tell the whole story, and the judges may well have voted on the story behind the image as much as on the image itself.  My interpretation (presented in the order in which they were originally posted to the blog) of the key photos presented in each post is that these tell as much of the tale as can be told in a picture:

LLR’s Lace Disaster

Progress, Disaster, and Cast On

Peacock Feathers Variant

Negative Progress

It was a close race.  The two runners up, Progress, Disaster, and Cast on   and Negative Progress were tied for a very close second place.  The winner is……

Peacock Feathers Variant! This disaster was ultimately overcome by tinker!

Four our second category (you’ll note we’re running these by the number of entries), you collectively nominated have five contestants for

Lace on Vacation

You can see the full posts for each of these entries by following this link (again, to a new window or tab).  It is harder to pull out single shots for this event, as some of the posts intentionally included a number of shots to show how much fun the lace was having.  Even so, here are some representative views.

Scarf on Vacation

Pictures At Last, The Shawl

Waves Finished

I’m Back

Lace Everywhere

Again, the competition was fierce. Oddly, the second place winner (Lace Everywhere) was unanimous – because  it place third for all three judges.  Third place was tied — because each of the posts in third place placed second with only one judge.  But the first place winner, shown here in another shot, was a unanimous among the judges (our only such winner).

A Scarf on Vacation.

This scarf’s chaperone for it’s prize winning vacation was – ShadowDancer.

(the Prize Maven blushes furiously, and comes to the stage just long enough thank the many who made this possible — her mother, and Joan (the Fairy GodKnitter for taking her on that last cruise on the Niagara River, and Anne Hanson for the pattern, and Malabrigo for the yarn and….. ).

We pause now for station identification.  Stay tuned for the Lace Extravaganza Award.