For the last 8 years I’ve been hosting a pie baking contest at the end of the summer. Piefest 8 will take place on Sunday. Today I’m working on making prizes for the winners, as I do every year. I also make prizes for our bowling league. Once my friend Rachael told me, “You’ve made every prize I’ve ever won.”

We were brainstorming ideas for this year’s Piefest prizes, and I think Shama came up with a good one, but you’ll have to come to Piefest to see what it is. (If you want to come to Piefest, send me an e-mail.) Piefest prizes are usally framed plaques with the name of the award on them. One year they were little 4×6 paintings and one year they were paper cuttings, but last year was my favorite. The prizes were based on weird photos found on the Internet. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Here’s the one for “Best In Show,” although we agonized over it since there were so many other great photos.

This is the photo we almost used for Best In Show. A year later, I kind of like it better. Oh well.

Here’s the award for “Most Ambitious Pie.” I thin it’s the prettiest one we made.

My favorite, however, was the award for “Best Savory Pie”

Some if them we really agonized over. Here’s the one we ended up using:

It narrowly beat out this one:

But this is the one that totally cracked me up:

The award for “Best Miscellaneous Pie” was the most difficult. Here’s what it ended up being:

But it was almost this: