As I posted on the ice carving secrets facebook fan page sometime ago, Edwin Winslow won the Makita die grinder and carving bit from Ice Crafters. Congratulations to Edwin and thanks to everybody who participated in the contest!

Thank you Laura Baker, Chris Swarbrick, Eric Knoll, Chris Wyer, Elizabeth Whitney, Sean Leahy, Diego Echeverry, Chris Currier, Robb and Stephanie Dunn, Jeff Kaiser, Vesna Klajic, Chef Lisa M, David Gustafson, Laz at NiceWork Ice, Brian McKinney, Danny Bloss, Ron Meyn, Chan Kitburi, Todd Shipman, Elizabeth Simi W, and Rick Suchoski for entering and I wish there were more awesome prizes to give away!

    In this contest, the third Facebook contest that we’ve held so far, we had by far the best participation. Certainly, offering the best prize to date had something to do with that. (Thanks to Alice from Ice Crafters for supplying the die grinder!) But due to the contest, we added a whole bunch of quality photos and videos to the page and started some interesting ice sculpting industry discussions. This makes the page more useful for everybody and I hope that you all will continue to post content to the page, even if there’s not a contest going on!

    I wanted to say something about how the winner was chosen, because, for all you know, I picked Edwin to win just because I felt like it. To choose the winner, I tallied up all the entries and assigned each contestant numbers according to how many entries they’d earned. Edwin, for example, was assigned the numbers 81 through 85 because his submissions earned him 5 entries. Then, to make choosing the winner as fair and as impartial as I could, I enlisted the help of former NICA webmaster Jim Ottens. There were (oddly) a total of 100 entries earned by the 23 contestants, so I asked Jim to use random.org, to randomly choose a number from 1 to 100. Without telling me what the number was, he generated the number and then took a screenshot of the result. When he was ready, we sent simultaneous emails to one another; he sent me the random number screenshot and I sent him the list of contestants and their corresponding entry numbers. The result was “84,” which meant that Edwin won.

    When Edwin’s number came up, I was actually a little frustrated. This had nothing to do with Edwin himself; I’ve seen him in Alaska a number of times and I think Edwin’s a great guy and a fantastic ice sculptor. It was because Edwin’s photo submissions had accidentally ended up on the ice carving secrets group page instead of the fan page. This wasn’t the first time this had happened, but with Edwin, I’d caught the goof too late to get him to correct it. But I wasn’t too worried about one of his numbers coming up, because there was only a 1 in 20 shot of this happening. Then, of course, one of his numbers DID! So I went back over the rules of the contest and I fortunately couldn’t find anything that specifically disqualified Edwin; in other words, the mistake was all mine! This is why Edwin’s photos on the fan page were posted well after the end of the contest. If you look at the group page, you’ll see that he posted his pics during the contest. Needless to say, I’ll be more specific the next time around!

Edwin, Mark Davis, Dorjsuren Lkhagvador, and Tsagaan Munkh-Erdene (the latter two are from Mongolia) sculpted this
at the 2009 World Ice Art Championships, winning second place in the multi-block realistic category. It was titled “Swimming Lesson.”

This submission by Edwin was oddly prophetic... (See why)

    As I write this, the new contest is starting. I hope that even more ice carvers will enter this contest. Why not? It’s free and somebody will win a very cool ice sculpting tool. Click here for more details...