Knitting Night in Norway

The U.S. has Sunday, Monday and occasionally Thursday Night Football, Canada has Hockey Night in Canada and on Friday, November 1, there will be Knitting Night in Norway.

That evening there will be an approximate 5 hours of live television broadcast plus an additional 4 hours of pre-game show. All this to show the Norwegian attempt to set a Guinness world record of shear to sweater. That will include shearing a sheep, spinning the wool and finally knitting a sweater. Australia has held this record since 2004 by getting all of this done in 4 hours, 51 minutes and 14 second. The Norwegian team includes (as all teams of this type do) 1 sheep shearer and 7 wool artists. Here's a Canadian website (do scroll down to International Back to Back Wool Challenge) that describes the competition. I do know completing in less than 5 hours is incredibly fast knitting, spinning and shearing. Check out the times of the winners in the last couple of years; over 5 hours is prevalent. (And if you want the full history of how all this got started in 1811, check out this Australian website.)

This knitting marathon is part of a Slow TV movement in Norway, which seems to bring out the most pejorative comments from other countries' media writers. Terms like boring and mundane seem to pop up quite a bit in the English-speaking media coverage of the event. Examples of this type of coverage can be found here and here.

But really is all this disparaging talk necessary? There are so many North American television reality-based programs. There are plenty of us who find that genre boring and mundane, Honey Boo Boo and the Kardashians come to mind for me. And what about watching a televised golf or fishing show (these ideas for comparison belong to Stephanie Pearl-McPhee)? Is watching someone knitting any more or less exciting than watching someone fish? Have you ever watched someone fishing, there isn't much happening for very long expanses of time. At the very least with Guinness record setting knitting fingers and needles will be furiously moving.

Commentary for a live knitting show would be interesting. Would a new vernacular be developed for things like twisted stitches, something like "oh she just shanked or hooked that stitch?" Or what about having to tnik work, would we say "she's actively backing away from that mess." Or what about a dropped stitch, "boy she's totally lost it now."

I tip my hat to the Norwegians for being out in front on this Slow TV movement. Perhaps Norway has found the next new trend. Now if I can only figure out how to see that live show and get it translated simultaneously, my weekend will be great. Not as good as this past weekend, but certainly full of good, clean knitting fun. But short of all this good luck, I can re-watch this 22 minute video of the Norwegian team doing a practice run for the November 1 event.

Oh and just to prove I was there, SP-M (Stephanie Pearl-McPhee) photographed us on Saturday night. See me there in the third row left of center. Ok, keep looking, there's the man knitting on the left with two empty seats in front of him, with the woman in the lovely white sweater he knit for her. I'm the one a row behind him in black and white just off his left shoulder, knitting away myself.

The photo SP-M took on Saturday night

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