OWOH Winners!

This has been a spectacular event! I managed to visit the blog of every participant, and boy what a treat! I now subscribe to over 220 new blogs between those maintained by participants and others that left their names here. I have had a blast traveling around the world via your blogs - really how could I not?

I did not count how many times I added my name to drawings, but I did my best to limit myself to items that really struck me or that I could actually use. There were some really neat things/art/objects offered up or created for the event, it was challenging at times not to get caught up in the frenzy and just throw my name in everywhere!

I ended up with 354 entries for my giveaway. I requested an active blog be in place by those that wanted to throw their name into the drawing. I did visit each and every blog from those comments. After culling the duplicates (there were only 2) and those that did not have active blogs, the final number of entrants was 320. Pretty amazing, I think.

I mulled over how I might choose my winners. I know lots of folks planned to use random number generators, but I just couldn't. I wanted it to be a little more hands on - I'm crazy like that (control issue perhaps?).

I have giveaways here frequently and I enjoy the name drawing process as much as the rest of it. Over 300 is a LOT of comments though. So here's how I managed it - for anyone that's interested...



All my comments go to my Yahoo email account. I set up a separate folder for the OWOH giveaway and another folder for 'rejects' and saved all the incoming comments in one of those folders in the order of date/time received. I then added the number of posts to an Excel spreadsheet (in this case 318) so I could cut each one out and add them to my little basket. Since messages are numbered 25 to a page in Yahoo, it makes the process a snap!



After midnight struck, I drew two numbers out of the basket. Here are the winners:

The flower goes to Farmchick of Fresh from the Farm

and

The lips go to Jana of One Hillaceous Dream

Congratulations ladies and a big thank you to everyone that visited!

I'd like to take just a moment again to thank Lisa Swifka for organizing and managing the event. It was no small task to visit each blog - I can't imagine how much time it took to manage the links and the blog.

BRAVO Lisa... take a bow, it was another great year!