BlogHer Handmade Creative Connection Event: Day 1

Can I just say, “Wow.”

What a full day of amazing, beautiful, powerful, smart, informed, creative, talented, brave, crafty, geeky, inventive women.

Though I took notes on each session, my summaries of the sessions would never be as excellent as the live blogs from Patti Nichols and the other live BlogHer bloggers at the event so I will let you read their good stuff here. I also did an excessive amount of tweeting from my Swap-O-Rama-Rama twitter handle @SORR_Chicago (full tweet list below).

Here are the overall thoughts I have after the 1st day:

Crafty people are awesome. I knew this already, but after feeling all the positive energy in every single session, after hearing Mena Trott’s (of SewWeekly.com) story of being trolled-to-tears in other non-crafty blogging communities, and after hearing so many moving, inspiring stories from so many women, it has all been confirmed completely. I love this community and how inclusive, warm, supportive and inviting it is. It was also confirmed by meeting some really cool people including (but not limited to) Patti, Megan Anmah (craftingMBA.com), Kathy Cano-Murillo (the CraftyChica), and Tara Gentile (taragentile.com) who is pictured at the top of this post.
People need positive. From what I could tell from the successful people presenting, they seemed to focus on the positive in their blogs. This seems important in this community in particular. People craft because they love it and it makes them feel good. They don’t want to find a bunch of drama in their websites. I think especially right now in America this is needed.
The “Experience” is the new black. Multiple speakers said that creating a superior experience is more important than anything else. They didn’t say it point blank, but I think this means that you don’t need to have a superior or particularly new product as long as you can create a superior, unique, engaging experience for your customers. I’m mulling this. I think there’s something big in this. I need to percolate, my head is too full of awesome right now.