Meet the Blogger with Holly Becker

Good morning my sweet friends. Wow, my last post let to an interesting discussion didn’t it. Thank you to everyone who let me know how they felt about the plight of being a home / craft blogger. Some of you were even worried that I was seriously contemplating quitting. Well let me put your mind at rest:

I AM NOT LEAVING, QUITTING, STOPPING OR OTHERWISE BAILING OUT. Songbird means far too much for me to even consider it. So don’t worry you’ll see enough of me after the summer vacation. Heck I have so much planned already that you might actually think there is a bit too much Songbird in your (blogging) life in the future .

Anyway today I wanted to share what I did over the weekend.

I got to meet a whole lot of real-life bloggers and even some famous ones.

I went to the Meet the Blogger event in Amsterdam. Organized by Holly Becker from Decor8 herself. She was in town for a book signing of her fabulous home décor book she published and decided it would be fun to meet up with some Euro based home décor bloggers.

Pictures of Decor8 self made shop window. Isn’t it gorgeous!

About a 150 of us showed up, some even came from as far as the UK, Spain or France. It was a lot of fun, let me tell you.

In the past I would always get so extremely jealous when all the Blissdom talk would start to circle around blogland. I even calculated how much it would cost me to attend a conference in the States like that. Well let me tell you cross Atlantic flights ain’t cheap. So I sulked and cried and shrug it off as impossible. So when I heard about Holly’s plans to have a real bloggers meeting in Amsterdam I jumped at the chance to sign up.

And I was not disappointed. To quote Holly herself (loosely) “blogging is so wonderful because it let’s you meet other weirdoes who are always busy fiddling with their house”. And then meeting those weirdoes in real life and seeing that behind every blog there really is a real woman is magic.

We met over coffee and cupcakes, we mingled, we exchanged business cards, we laughed, we cried (ok that is an exaggeration) we talked a lot (that is an understatement) and it was great. Blogging babes truly are a great crowd to hang out with.

And I bought Holly’s book and she signed it for me….

And then it was all over and I took the train home. And on the way back I didn’t even mind so much that it took me an extra hour (making it a 3,5 hr trainride one way) to get home because now I had Holly’s book to read.

Click the book and it will take you to it at Book Depository, my favorite (affiliate) bookstore.

And let me tell you this book is so worth your money. It oozes with inspiration, it gives real life workable home décor advice, it is fun to read and to look at AND it is thick! This ain’t your average home décor book that won’t last you longer than your favorite magazine. No Holly and Joanna really covered everything and as a result you have a lovely, big, heavy book that will keep you entertained for hours and hours.

So much of blogging is spend doing ‘alone’. I sit here behind my keyboard and type away. I try to do it as if I am having a real conversation with you and you are sitting next to me. But you aren’t, are you! And yes when you comment on a post – and I LOVE that – you talk back to me. But we still aren’t ‘together’ for real. That is why a blogger meet-up like this is so great. Not only did it give me new inspiration and new energy to go on, it also made this blogging thing more real, less virtual, more grounded and less ‘in the cloud’. I loved it.

Of course, now I want to attend Blissdom or any other blogging conference even more….

So have you met any blogging friends for real? Met any blogging celebrities? Do you plan to attend a blogging conference? Will you go to Blissdom 2012? Will you take me with you to carry your suitcase?…..

Love,