Albina Polyanskaya, Ukraine ( email   website )

Fashion Colorworks contest is international and since the beginning it immediately became appreciable with its high-level submissions and stood in one row even with well-known bead artists' competitions. I just admire how strong on technique and design beadworks sent to the second Fashion Colorworks are! This year competition was very hard, most of the works not only very accurately reflected the proposed color combinations, but were stunningly creative and flawless in execution.

I would like to thank the My Lovely Beads for a very convenient and an objective system of evaluation. If you would have to evaluate on an "LIKE - DON'T LIKE" (that would be terrible!), the jury could earn a strong nervous disorder - try subjectively determine the favorites when you like 90% of all work! As well, that's great that impassively automated system is counting results!

I congratulate the winners of the contest, competition was not easy, as you and can see themselves looking at the works, but that and more valuable! I congratulate all finalists, being juried into the final is very a great success! And I congratulate all Fashion Colorworks participants!

Of course, some of the beadweavers are disappointed that their works are not passed in the final. But believe me, it is also move forward and success! How many times during the evaluation work, I caught myself thinking of what I could submit to the contest to meet high requirements! I came to the conclusion that I would have to work very hard to be competitive with other participants. And you have already done that!

Maiko Kage Felton, USA ( website )

It was an honor to be one of jurors for the Fashion Colorworks 2011. I was deeply impressed by the quantity and quality of the entries. Many of the entries displayed a high degree of creativity and technical skill. And the finalists were simply fantastic.

Judging this contest was indeed a challenging exercise. There were so many entries to review and rate. Fortunately the contest organizer, My Lovely Beads, did an excellent job organizing the evaluation process. I found the method of evaluating the entries extremely fair and objective.

As a juror I had to rate each entry in five areas: color combination, composition, technique, use of material and overall impression. We should always be mindful of the aforementioned criteria not only for our contest entries but for all of our beading endeavors. And this bring us to the essence of this contest: Not only does Fashion Colorworks celebrates and honors the best of the best, but it also inspires all of us - contestants, jurors and spectators - to achieve a higher level of competency and discipline in our beadweaving.

If your work was not one of the finalists, I encourage you to continue pursuing your beading passion, hone your technical skills, and never stop expanding your creative boundaries. For the finalists, I applaud your discipline, creativity and overall competence.

Everyone, I'd like to give you a deep bow and a hearty kudos for participating in this contest. I look forward to seeing your entries in Fashion Colorworks 2012!

Peter Sewell, UK ( blog   website )

I was invited to be one of the three judges for this competition by Zoya Gutina. The Fashion Colorworks competition is fast becoming one of the major online competitions for beaders and beadweavers across the globe, and I was honored to be asked to participate as a judge.

Zoya had made it as easy as possible for us to log on and rate the entries, by grading them from 1 to 10 in five disciplines, the last being "overall impression" - this is always a good idea as sometimes all the technical criteria can be met without the piece having that "wow" factor.

I lost count of the entries, I think there were close to two hundred in all categories. Many of these entries were original, innovative, and beautiful to look at, but a lot of entries shouldn't have been entered into this competition, or any other competition. That may sound harsh, but I shall explain my reasoning. Some of the entries completely ignored the color requirements, some of the entries were simply thrown together with no intention of matching any of the requirements, some of the photographs made the pieces almost unrecognizable due to bad focusing, or bad backgrounds, and some of the entries made it seem as if the entrant really didn't want to be there!

Having said that, there were some absolutely stunning entries, which reflected hours upon hours of thought and planning to make that piece worth a place amongst its peers. These were by far the hardest to judge! As a beadweaver I expected to find a favorite in the beadweaving category - how wrong I was! My overall favorite - which only dropped two points in my judging - was in the Beaded Objects And Accessories section! I did have some surprising favorites in other sections though, it was quite an eye opening experience to discover what I liked and didn't like.

This competition should run and run, I believe it has all the ingredients for a major international online beading contest, and whoever wins should be very proud of their winning entry - it went through some very stringent judging!

I look forward to Fashion Colorworks 2012!