I can’t believe it’s been over a week since I was in Amsterdam for the Meet The Blogger conference.  It was a completely crazy few days and while I enjoyed it, I kind of felt like my fuzzy brain was in a little bit of meltdown afterwards.

It was fantastic seeing some familiar faces, those whom I’d met previously in both London and Stockholm earlier in the year but a very tight schedule and a whirlwind few days meant the whole event screamed by in a tornado of meeting, greeting, moving on to the next talk, the next workshop, the next event, the next conversation.  And because of that, I felt like I couldn’t actually just breathe and take in the sights and truly appreciate just being there amongst all these fabulously talented bloggers with whom I share so much in common.

I flew into Schiphol on Sunday evening and met up with my partner in crime, Carole at the hotel and then we made our way into the city for a bite to eat.  There we met a really lovely older gentlemen who warned us off any ‘coffee houses’ (Ha! Those days are long over for me anyway) and generally eased us into Amsterdam with their laid back and thoroughly friendly vibe.

Monday morning, we were up early and made our way to the venue.  I loved the vibe of the place, all the more spectacular with the chattering excitedness of well over 100 bloggers packed into the same room.

We started off on a bang with a keynote address by Victoria of SF Girl By Bay.  She was brilliant – so humble, so funny, a little awkward in a completely relatable way.  I immediately loved her.  Carole and I got to chat with her afterwards and she was genuinely so incredibly nice.  Don’t you just love when that happens?

The venue was superb – industrial touches everywhere.  I took a stupid amount of pictures but here are some of my favourites.

More workshops followed and then our next keynote speaker – Tricia Guild of Designer’s Guild who was there to chat about her new book.  So much gorgeous inspiration.

We were then, rather like a herd of exciteable cattle, taken to our final treat of the day – the Designer’s Guild showroom.  But the best – and probably the highlight of the whole event for me – was that we were taken by boat through the canals to our destination.  Like I said, I felt we had little time to just take in the sights of a fantastic city and enjoy just being there so the 40 minutes or so we were on the boat in the sunshine (the weather was glorious, we were so lucky), was time to do just that.  And plus, I love being on the water.   And plus, the seats in the inside were covered in grey zebra print.  It was like they knew I was coming.

At our destination, we were able to check out the gorgeous textiles at Designer’s Guild where Tricia was signing her new book, Colour Deconstructed.  I debated buying her book there and then but they only had copies in Dutch (which was a bit of a shame, there were so many of us from around Europe) so I decided I’d wait to buy the book once I was back on home turf.

But the textiles!! Ohhh the textiles.  Lovely lovely.

Gorgeous, no?

The following day took us to the Woonbeurs interior show which I’ll share with you in a later post.  I took nearly 300 pictures in my 2 1/2 days in Amsterdam so whittling them all down has been a bit of a project! Apologies for the overload in this post but I hope you enjoyed them.

Have you ever been to Amsterdam?