Welcome to Gaia! ::

LadyHealingHands first wrote to Oralinde, whose profile is worth a visit to any and all Lord of the Rings Fans.
Oralinde became judge #1.

Next, came Starshine, a talented art judge chosen for our second judge. Starshine ended up turning in her vote first, BUT what followed was a bit of a snafu, you see Starshine was attracted to, applied to and was accepted to our Guild! Luckily I spotted her name before she was accepted and sorted. So I wrote her and proposed that she fulfill her judging agreement first so she would be unbiased, then we would sort her, which is what happened. However, when I posted that we were closing the Decorating contest so the voting could take place, Slytherin asked for more time. So I decided to nullify Starshine's vote and seek another objective judge I was decidedly lucky to have Mr. Norell, (now name changed to Simon Wells) accept.

Here is Starshine's original vote:



Starshine: The reason I choose Ravenclaw is that it had an excellent balance of graphics and textual content. All the information was laid out in a clear and easy to read fashion. It introduced all the relevant Ravenclaw characters with both graphic and caption. The entire room had a fun and up lifting feel, perfectly suited to the festive season icon_biggrin.gif

Hufflepuff shared many of the same good points as Ravenclaw, it was bright and cheerful, although the text might be a shade too bright as I had to highlight the text to read it (but since yellow is its house colour I can't really fault that). It also had a good mix of graphics and content.

I ended up being sorted into Ravenclaw! I guess I'll have to work hard on not being too much of an air head from now on!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Next came Judge #1, Oralinde's vote: I thought Slytherin's was the best (even though was never my favorite house...)
The decorations were organized neatly and were very creative. Also, it would have taken a LONG time to find or draw all of the pictures of the characters. The description beside each character's pictures were very neat also!

Ravenclaw's common room would be 2nd on my list. I like their use of house colors, and they did a really good job of demonstrating the special features of the house, and the decorations really shows what type of people were in the House. It would have been really hard to decorate a House that was not mentioned often, and that'll take a lot of imagination. They did a very nice job of putting the pictures, drawings, and decorations together!

Simon Wells of the marvelous Friends of English Magic Guild, judge #2:

Everything about the Slytherin house entry has the feel of a polished presentation. Excellent choice of graphics and very easy and pleasing to read through. The research was well written and topics well chosen. Footnotes giving credit to sources, while not as thorough as it could have been, were nevertheless present and well done. They lost points for not to having done any digital or freehand art or writing for the event, but still remained the clear winner in my opinion.

I can't come up with a second choice. The other three were all tied for second place. Hufflepuff (the common room with member avis) and Gryffindor (The Sleigh Ride filk was wonderful!!) had excellent original art and writing, Ravenclaw had the best research and footnotes and also some wonderful digital edits and creations.

And so the winner of the Decorating Contest is

First place: Slytherin - Congratulations to Garnet17th!
Second place: Ravenclaw -Congratulations to Orna

And really, Congratulations also to SuperKoolPartyGirl and March Hare`- all 4 of you were tied for spectacular in my book--LHH