Audience participation and the birth of Knitting Pundits

For Shetland Wool Week this year, I decided that I needed to launch a new sound piece. The piece is called Knitting Pundits, and involves myself and my wondrous comrade Louise Scollay (AKA Knit British) commentating on the technical skillz of knitters in the manner of football pundits. We wrote out a script which included a lot of word play around foot-work (football) and sock construction (knitting) and also involving superb puns involving substitutions (as in when you run out of yarn) and so on. We read out our entertaining script and then explained that to really bring the concept alive, we needed some sounds from the audience - the sense of an engaged stadium of knitters, following the play with rapt attention. To collect their responses and to create this soundscape, I read out scenarios in knitting which I then correlated to football. An offside situation; a knitting foul; a goal; winning the match; and making it to the wool cup. I read out the scenarios and encouraged the audience to respond accordingly. Their responses were collected and I will later mix them with myself and Louise's Punditry. I feel this is the start of something awesome, and I love how excited the knitters are at the end of the recording. I think everyone enjoyed this feminist attempt to treat knitting as seriously as we treat sport. Sorry about the patchy recording quality - to avoid peaking, the microphone is set up quite low, so my speaking is pretty quiet but the audience participation is fantastic and loud at the end...