Awards Night

So I thought I'd give you a bit of a rundown on Awards Night last week at Convention.  I was absolutely thrilled and excited to receive an award at Awards Night.  Most of the Awards are for Top Sales and Top Recruiting, but for little ol' hobby demo me, well, the only way for ME to win an award on Awards night is the Artisan Award.  So you better believe I was ready to go to convention for my one and only trip up there.  :)
Above is a photo of us from the convention highlights video I posted a few days ago.  Anyway, my good friend Jenn Picard, also won Artisan Award this year.  In the picture above, I'm the blonde in the middle with the black dress and the White flower.  Jenn is the blond beside me with the purplish dress and yellow flower, 
Normally when they list the artisan award winners on the bi screen, they start by naming all the Artisan Award Finalists.  The way the judging process works is that they start by laying all the entries out on the floor in a very large room.  Then all the judges go over all the entries and pick their top 10 or so.  This smaller group is the finalists because between the various judges, there are different top picks and so the pool of Finalists is larger than 10, and it changes from year to year.  From the pool of finalists, the judges examine every entry carefully.  They are specifically looking to see that these finalists have all followed the rules and have all the criteria required.    From this list, they then narrow it down.  I understand that this year, they narrowed it down to the top 15, and then struggled to narrow it down to the Top 10.  But eventually they did, and I was lucky to have made the cut.  I was a finalist last year, and that inspired me to enter again this year.  Many of the winners this year have entered several times, but only one of us,Summer Stone, has won more than once.  So if you are entering and not winning, all I can say is KEEP TRYING.  Every year the entries change, so you never know when your time will come.
OK, so enough babling...
As I said, they first announce the finalists, and then they announce the winners to come up to the stage.  Well, apparently in the past, they have only listed the non-winning finalists first and then the winners.  BUT this year, they listed up all the finalists together, including those of us who were finalists that became winners.  So we were all confused, when our names were called in the finalist list. (at our dinner with Shelli Gardener, she was wondering why we all looked so confused, and not elated - because we were all panicking that we were only finalists and not winners and that there had been a mistake.  AND to top it all off, Jenn and I were standing beside each other, and they kept the camera on us for a painfully long period of time.  We were totally embarassed, and my upline was cracking jokes on the side to make us laugh. - but we made it through.
And then we were called up for our presentation, photos, and a quick congrats from Shelli.  Then we went down the side of the stage and got our Artisan Bracelets.  Below you will find some photos of it.  Wow -I'm terrified to wear it in case I lose it.  What a night.
There was an after party, with dancing, and treats, but we left early and went back to our hotel.  We had a few 'treats' in the hotel lounge with some new friends and closed down the bar.  Then Jenn and I went back to our hotel and had a really late night chatting.  It was like a real, old fashioned, slumber party.  Remember those?  Wow, it's been years, (and a husband and 2 kids ago).

The following night we had our artisan dinner.  If you haven't already, please click here, to check out my previous post about the Artisan Award Dinner.