Despite spending the weekend coughing, sniffling, nose-blowing, and apologizing to those around me, I had a great time at Knit Nation. Even aside from phlegm levels I was clearly not at my best; I can’t really recommend solo travel while on codeine. But it was fabulous.
I enjoyed hanging aroud the campus, I learned things in all of my classes (which were much easier than the physics lectures normally held in those rooms – I think I’d need full brain capacity for those!) and I really felt like a part of a tribe. Lots of people were attending alone; it was never a problem to walk up to a table with an empty chair and say “May I sit here?” In fact, every time I did I was not only welcomed but also included in the conversation instantly, and welcomed the next time the same people saw me.
In fact, it was what I wanted my first SF con to be and what it wasn’t. I’m not sure what accounts for the difference: it may be that Worldcon was too big for a first venture, or that many more people had gone solo to Knit Nation. It may be that because this was the first Knit Nation, fewer people went expecting to meet the old friends they see only at conventions every year. I don’t know, but I’d have expected being shaped by the same books to lead to much more in common than just sharing a liking for playing with sticks and string, but it was at the knitting event that I had more of a sense of being Among My People.
Odd, and probably not enough data points to draw a firm conclusion. Need to attend more knitting events and more SF cons, clearly.
I took classes in sweater fitting with Anne Hanson, the wonders of wool with Clara Parkes (where I got to knit a continuous swatch of bits of wool from lots of different sheep breeds, and two-at-a-time toe-up socks with Chrissie Gardiner, wherein I decided that I may actually like magic loop even more than knitting socks with two circs. Another thing that was much better than I expected was the Ravelry talk; I told Jess later (when Jess and Casey were circulating during the Ravelry party) that I’m pretty sure if they wanted to, she and Casey could make a healthy living on the lecture circuit, explaining how they built a single-interest social-networking site that’s now got something like 800,000 people. (And if Knit Nation is any indicator, a fair number of those are now telling their friends “Ravelry changed my life!”) If they hold Knit Nation again, and if there’s anyone on the fence about going, I should mention two things: in addition to the teachers I mentioned, instructors included the likes of Nancy Bush and Cookie A; and Wollmeisse (you know, the German indie dyer who posts new batches around 3AM US time and whose yarn sells out instantly?) brought literally a metric tonne of yarn to sell.