Possible to alternate between two loops

You need two queries for this. Let’s say the ID of the featured category is 5. Then you set up two queries retrieving 3 posts each:

$query1 = new WP_Query( array( 'cat' => '5', 'posts_per_page' => 3  ) );

$query2 = new WP_Query( array( 'cat' => '-5', 'posts_per_page' => 3  ) );

Now you have two sets of posts with a maximum of three items. There might be less. I don’t know how you want to handle that situation, but assuming you want an even amount of posts you would loop through them like this:

while ($query1->have_posts() && $query2->have_posts()) {
  ...
  $query1->the_post()
  echo '<h1>' . the_title() '</h1>';
  echo '<div class="post-content">' . the_content() . '</div>'
  ...
  $query2->the_post()
  echo '<h1>' . the_title() '</h1>';
  echo '<div class="post-content">' . the_content() . '</div>'
  ...
  }

Note: I didn’t test this code, so beware of typos and so on.