A local pastor made a big splash on the national stage this past weekend bringing home two awards.

Keith Kitchen, a Swift Current singer/songwriter, won Folk Album of The Year and CD/DVD Artwork Design at the 39th Covenant Awards.

The pastor at Trailview Alliance Church has been a musician for about a decade and said he's happy to see all of his hard work pay off.

"Sometimes not seeing a whole lot of remuneration from shows and certainly in a climate where making a living as a musician gets more and more difficult, to receive this kind of recognition from my peers and from other artists is a tremendous encouragement," he explained.

Kitchen had six nominations for the awards that were held in Edmonton last Saturday night, so going home with hardware didn't seem out of the question to him.

"I felt pretty confident that I was going to come home with something," he said. "Just the praise this album has received over the last couple of years from some pretty influential in the industry, I felt it was a pretty good bet we were going to come home with something, I just wasn't sure what."

His album Orbits won him both Folk Album of The Year and CD/DVD Artwork Design.

This wasn't the first time Kitchen had won a Covenant Award, he also won one in 2013 for Folk/Roots Song of the Year. But this time felt different to him.

"The best part was being able to hang out with these other artists and really for the first time feel like I was among peers," he said. "To be able to go and celebrate with them afterwards was just really thrilling and surreal to be in the company of these guys and feel like a peer."

Kitchen noted that he beat out one of his idols, Steve Bell, for Folk Album of The Year, something he joked was a foregone conclusion in past years if Bell was nominated in that category he would be the winner.