So I went to Blog On MOSI on Sunday, my first ever blogging conference and it was brilliant. I was so busy the week before that I didn’t have too much time to be nervous. My main worry, getting there I decided to solve at the last minute by driving – it was quicker, I felt more in control, the only real downside was that I couldn’t enjoy the lovely wine from Laithwaites or the Vodka cocktails from SodaStream. I did have a sneaky sip of the Laithwaites Pinot Grigio which was lovely, and I will just have to hope I convince my husband that SodaStreams are essential for modern living at some point soon 😉 *edit: I have succeeded and we have ordered one!*

The nice thing when I arrived was that people I actually knew (a little bit) were doing the signing in, so I didn’t have that awful moment of erm Hi, I’m here for the blogging thing…. There were lots of lovely brands to wander round and meet including Black Sheep Wool from Warrington who had a go at teaching me to crochet (I’m rubbish at learning anything new with people watching) and Hillary’s Blinds whose fabrics I particularly fell for.

The first session was a short talk about improving your photography with John Arnold of photowalkthrough.com and personally I found it really helpful. I’ve come away with a list of tips on how to compose pictures better and I really have noticed a difference in how attractive my photos look. I took a couple of practice pictures around MOSI (The museum of science and industry) and I am pretty pleased with them.

There were 3 main round table sessions on Blogging etiquette, The Law & PR all of which were run by lovely people who had taken time to share their knowledge with us. I got to meet several people who I follow on twitter like the one and only mammasaurus.

I had a brilliant day and you could see the enormous amount of effort that Laura from TiredMummyOfTwo has put in over the last few months to bring everything together. I was lucky enough to win on both the tombola and the raffle in aid of clic sergeant so when I got home I was able to give a little surprise to each of my kiddies. My son got some sea monkeys and the Julia Donaldson book A squash and a squeeze – which he has had as his bedtime book all week. My daughter got a Hallmark teddy bear called Cooper who will respond to key sentences in his story book.

Of course I didn’t just come home with the prizes from the raffle and tombola, but also with a couple of awesome goody bags stuffed to bursting with vouchers and samples. The first bag took over my livng room a bit when I unpacked it, the second was full of so many sweeties from Swizzles Matlow that I have no idea what to do with them, and lots of wonderful vouchers, one of which is why I currently have a rug doctor sat in my hallway waiting to clean my carpets on Sunday.

I am pretty late to the party with this post, if you want to see what I’ve been up to this week check out my next post, I bet the people from Legoland at BlogOn would particularly approve 😉