MIDTOWN — Professional and amateur gift wrapping aficionados went scissor-to-scissor for the Scotch Brand Most Gifted Wrapper annual contest Friday morning.
Held in Rockefeller Center, the contest pitted eight participants for three rounds of a ribbon-tying, paper-wrangling and Scotch-taping competition to see who could come up with the most creatively wrapped gifts in time for the holiday season.
The cumbersome gifts included a board game, a gumball machine, an old-fashioned sled, and the final round — a yard-size plastic red and blue play set, complete with two slides.
Retired banker and California resident Rosie Sato was the winner. She created a panda bear face out wrapping paper to cover the play set, using the slide as the panda's tongue. The ears, eyes and nose were made out of bright blue and white shiny wrapping paper.
For her creation, amateur wrapper Sato won $10,000, and what she called her "bragging rights."
"I'm so excited, I just can't even explain it," Sato said after she won Friday.
Sato said she had been anticipating the event for a long time. Even though she's an amateur wrapper, her friends often kept her elaborate bows she decorated gifts with, calling them "Rosie Bows."
Sato decorated lots of her other gifts with red velvet and blue bows. She even topped off her panda play set with a shiny silver bow, meant to stick over its left ear.
At the end, Sato was pitted against another amateur and California resident Diana Lemos, who decorated her play set with silver wrapping paper and sparkling bows.
Sato said she felt the most difficult competition, however, was against professional gift-wrappers Renee Goetz and Jacob Marshak from New York, Alice Krause from Washington and Melissa Montoya from Arizona.
The other amateurs in the competition were Angela Choi, from Maryland, and Sandy Mayer, from Virginia.
The hardest part of wrapping the presents, she said, was figuring out how to wrap the giant play set. Other challenges, however, included time restraints in the total two-hour competition, the pressure to be creative and maintaining attention to detail.
"We had to clean up after ourselves, which I didn't know we had to do," Sato said.
"I was very intimidated," she added. "But it was a lot of fun."
