With grateful thanks to a little hamster ...

My last post featured the quilled bird of paradise which I entered into the Homyachok ("little hamster") Challenge - an excellent Russian craft and digital scrap challenge blog site whose creators judge the projects submitted to them on merit, rather than picking winners solely through a random number generator. The commonly-used random number approach has often put me off entering challenges, because I feel that the effort and skill put in to creating an entry go entirely unrecognised. But the 'little hamster' has restored my faith, by introducing three properly judged nomination categories for every challenge, complemented by the additional bonus of a lucky-number draw for a consolation prize.

The Homyachok Challenge blog is written in Russian, but there is a translation facility on the site. Unfortunately for me, however, I still couldn't understand the definition of the competition categories which are idiomatic and therefore difficult to translate into English - until my friend and fellow blogger White Racoon kindly took the trouble to explain!

She described the three nomination categories for the Homyachok Challenge as follows:
The first one - the 'Romantic' category - is self-explanatory. The second one - an idiomatic term made up from the two Russian words for 'hamster' and 'outstanding' literally means "the best of the best" - a category in which the winning nomination is awarded to the project that most impresses the Homyachok team. Finally, there is a category whose title translates as "Salvador Dali didn't even dream of that!", in which the winning project will be something very different, unusual or alternative. Thank you, White Racoon!

Well, I posted a link to my bird of paradise on the Homyachok Challenge site just a few days before going away for a short break, during which I pretty much forgot all about it. You can imagine my surprise and delight, therefore, to discover when I got home that my bird had actually received the winning nomination in the "best of the best" category. What an honour, especially as the standard of all the other entries was so high!

With a little additional translation help from White Racoon, I managed to identify the correct Homyachok Challenge winner's banner to place here on my blog (you can see it above this post in the panel on the right hand side) ... and I really hope this will help encourage many of my fellow quillers, crafters and digital artists to head right on over to the little hamster's site and check it out.  There are several imaginative new challenges posted there every month, with something to interest everyone. Standards are high, and the rules of entry are strict ... but I can honestly say that the honour of winning a nomination is all the more rewarding as a result.