I’ve spent the morning trying to locate my inner artist. However, I have now decided if there is even an ounce of artistry in this body it is buried so deep excavation would be far too costly and time-consuming to unearth it.

I am at present taking part in Holly Becker’s Blogging Your Way Boot Camp. Holly’s a visual person, she’s big on the whole mood board thing. When I completed my first Blogging Your Way course at the start of my illustrious blogging career I also had to complete a mood board. That time I did the whole cut and pasting thing. This time we were allowed to complete a digital mood board. Given my digital artistry skills are lower than my cut and pasting skills I decided to challenge myself by going digital.

There’s this site called Polyvore where you can click and drag images onto your own personal collage. There were a number of false starts, some pretty atrocious attempts actually, I’m all about the words people. However, eventually I managed to create the little stunner above that is meant to represent my blog.

You need to understand I was operating under some difficult conditions. Polyvore is about the beautiful, the pretty, the elegant, the stylised. There’s nothing there that could possibly represent Shambolic. People on Polyvore don’t lead shambolic lives. There’s no children. (Well with my limited ability I couldn’t find them). I’m sure if they were there they wouldn’t be wearing old and stained clothes with hair that needed cutting a month ago. The women are not mismatched and frazzled. So it was a challenge.

Here’s what I ended up with:

Ferris wheels and a woman standing on her head – an homage to the juggling act of daily life and a suggestion of the humour you may find in my blog. Funnily, I didn’t look back at my original mood board before I did this one, when I did I discovered I’d put a ferris wheel in that one too. I don’t particularly like ferris wheels. Not since the incident in 1978 at the Mudgee Show, when Jenny Thompson and I were on the Ferris Wheel with two bigger, heavier girls on the other side who kept rocking the basket, swinging us higher and higher, for someone not overly fond of heights it completely freaked me out, and left me with an ongoing terror of carnival rides of any description! So I have no idea why ferris wheels keep appearing in my mood boards.

Manage to sneak in a few words – love to represent the family, stuff about dreams, hope, believing – ’cause I’ve got that whole mid-life crisis thing going on, you know the one where I race to achieve my dreams before retirement home bingo and senility become my life.

Typewriter – to represent the dream to write – albeit the writer in the picture is much more well-manicured and jewellery encrusted than myself.

Photos of the sea – to show we are coastal based and feature a lot of my brother’s photography.

Then I threw in some odds and ends. Colours I like etc. Viola I’ve created a digital mood board. Go techno brilliant me.

Do you use mood boards? Do you think in pictures not words?

PS. Cause I’m worried about copyright stuff and don’t really get the Polyvore, Pinterest legalities below are links to every image I used in the creating the world’s greatest mood board.