A convention packing checklist that fits in a sling

A backpack at a convention is a mistake you make once. It is heavy, it hits people in queues, and you take it off to sit down and then leave it behind. The alternative is a sling of roughly two litres and the discipline to fill it correctly. This is the list we use, sorted by whether each item earns its place.

The one rule: if it does not get used every day of the event, it stays at the hotel.

Carry on your body, not in the bag

• Badge. On a lanyard or in a strap pocket, never inside the bag. You will be scanned twenty times a day. The Convention Utility Sling has a strap pocket for exactly this, which is the feature that made us look at it. Check its licence label on the pick page before buying — where a pick has not cleared our seller and licence check, we show no buy link at all.
• Phone. Front pocket, not the bag.
• One card and some cash. Artist alley is increasingly card-only, but card readers fail when the hall wifi does. Forty in small notes covers a day.

The bag itself

The sling has to do three things: sit across the chest without swinging, open one-handed, and hold a bottle upright. Most fail the third. A bottle lying flat inside a bag leaks eventually, and a bottle in your hand is one hand you do not have for the next four hours.

Hydration

• A folding bottle. Hall vendors charge what they like for water, and every hall has a fountain. The Folding Con Water Bottle collapses to a third of its height once empty, which is the point: it stops being volume the moment it stops being useful. The wide mouth takes ice from a vendor cup.
• Electrolyte sachets, two. Con halls are dry and you are walking eight kilometres a day. This is the item people skip and regret by three in the afternoon.

Power

• A small battery. Ten thousand milliamp hours is plenty for your phone and a friend's. Bigger is weight you carry for capacity you do not use.
• One short cable. Twenty centimetres. A long cable in a sling becomes a knot around everything else.

Protecting what you buy

This is where slings fail and backpacks win by default, so plan for it.

• A pin roll. Enamel pins are the most common artist alley purchase and the most commonly damaged, because they go loose into a pocket and the backs fall off. The Badge & Pin Travel Roll has felt panels that grip the backs, and rolled up it takes about the volume of a litre bottle. Unrolled at home, it is where the pins live, so it is not a con-only object.
• A folded tote. The flat kind that packs to the size of a wallet. Prints, artbooks, and anything larger than the sling go in it. You carry it empty until you need it, and then you never have to choose between buying a print and being able to carry it.
• A rigid card sleeve or two. For prints under A5, and for the business cards artists hand you, which you will otherwise lose.

Small things that earn their place

• Hand sanitiser, travel size. Every rail, every door, every handshake.
• Plasters, two. Con floors are concrete and new shoes are a bad idea, but somebody in your group will wear them.
• A pen. For signing queues, for the artist who has run out, for writing a booth number on your hand.
• Painkillers, one strip. The hall is loud and the lighting is bad.
• A snack that survives being sat on. A cereal bar, not a chocolate one.

What you wear

The bag list is short because the jacket carries the rest. A light layer with real pockets covers the walk from the hotel, the over-conditioned hall, and dinner afterwards. The Reversible Coach Jacket is on our list because it is plain on one side, so you can turn the graphic inward when you leave the venue and it goes back to being a jacket. It is not waterproof — we say so on its page — so if rain is likely, a packable shell adds fifty grams and saves the day.

Shoes: the ones you already walk in. A convention is not the day to find out about a new pair.

What is deliberately missing

No camera; the phone is the camera. No laptop or tablet; if you are working the event, you have a different bag. No cosplay repair kit; that is a whole second list and it lives with whoever is in costume. No printed schedule; the app is fine, and the paper one is a hundred grams of pulp by lunchtime.

The weight check

Pack it, pick it up, and ask whether you would carry it for nine hours. If the answer is no, take out the thing you added "just in case". Just in case is how a sling becomes a backpack, and a backpack is how you end up sitting on the floor by a pillar at four o'clock, guarding it.