[ The PR panel. ]

[ Annabelle's Wigs hair pieces and equipment. ]

[ Me and Jemma Louise of Floral Etiquette blog. ]

[ Dani from So Many Lovely Things and Stacey from ASOS Fashion Finder. ]

On Saturday afternoon about 150 bloggers gathered in central London for the third ‘TOWIB‘ (The Only Way Is Blogging) event, created and hosted by London Beauty Queen a.k.a. Hayley.

We arrived at the rather lovely Montague Hotel at midday (or in my case slightly later, fashionably late as always!) for 6 hours of networking and learning, both from each other and from some invited professionals who sat on panels and gave us the opportunity to ask questions. Claire from Annabelle’s Wigs was also in attendance so we got the chance to try on some hairpieces. I loved the pink wig I played with at the Tesco SS12 event so I made a bee-line for the green bob you can see me sporting above; I didn’t really suit me but it was so soft and felt really comfortable!

I tweeted throughout the event and I became worried I was clogging up people’s timelines but when I asked if people were finding my tweets useful and the resounding response was “hell yes” so I’m really glad you enjoyed them. I’ll post a summary of the notes I took and also include some of my tweets later this week, I’m sure you’ll find them beneficial.

There has been a lot of controversy about TOWIB based on comments made on Twitter and one particularly negative blog post. I won’t be linking to said post as in my opinion the blogger wrote her post purely to drive traffic to her blog – at least that’s what I’m hoping, I’d rather think that than think she was just being bitchy – and it seems to have worked as when I saw the post last night there were over 100 comments (compared to the usual 1 or 2 she gets per post).

Of course the event wasn’t perfect, are any? There are constructive suggestions that could be made and I’m sure Hayley would welcome them – if they were put to her in the right manner. I personally think she did an amazing job of putting on an event that got so many like-minded people together and she did it all in her spare time alongside working full-time and running her own blog. I just think it’s impossible to make 100% of that many people happy but I found the event to be mostly very useful and informative. In my opinion events like this are fantastic: you get to meet and mingle with people with a similar passion, even if they don’t necessarily write about fashion/lifestyle, and it’s a great way to discover new blogs and put real-life faces to URLs and Twitter handles.

Have you ever been to any blogger events like this? I’d love to hear your thoughts on them.