Who knew this would be the outfit that would earn me my first national journalism award. Figures.

Our entire department is celebrating the wins from The Society for Features Journalism’s 2014 Excellence-in-Features Awards and I’m smiling more than the purple fairy over there on the left because I won first place in the blog category. We’re in the division for mid-sized newspapers with a circulation of 90,001 to 199,999.

According to the judges…

First place: Debra Bass, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “Style File”
Judge’s comments: A nice mix of fun topics, such as creative Halloween costumes (with a great little video), and treatments of more thoughtful ones, such as the post about the dearth of non-pink and purple clothes for little girls.

By the way, that “great little video” was a bizarre production that took a week to produce and involved much pleading on my part. I wasn’t supposed to star it in. Our theater critic was slated to be the fairy but she became ill right before the shoot (we had 15 people coming so there was no time to reschedule). I went shopping the day before the video for a costume. I fell in love with the purple wig and the plum fairy was born.

Our whole department was named a winner for submitting covers from our food, entertainment, art, fashion and home sections.

One of the covers was an arduous fashion shoot we did called “The Boundless Joy of the Bridal Bubble.” We put a model in a bridal gown in a big plastic bubble on one of the coldest damn days of the year. We floated her on water, put her on the roof of a building, propped her up amongst the trees and had her standing on the snowy banks of a small lake. At one point, she said, “I’m walking but I can’t feel my feet, am I walking straight.” At that point, it seemed prudent to take her inside to warm up.

And in Sunday’s paper (below), our editor-in-chief gives us a shout-out.